“Ready?” Ilima asked, tapping him with an elbow.
Enk nodded, then they were off, striding toward the scarlet door, keeping a wary eye on those who watched them. A gaunt man spat at the street as they passed, but they ignored the insult.
“Why interview Senet next?” Ilima asked, pausing before the door. “What does she have to do with anything? ”
“I don’t know. A feeling? A hope?” Enk frowned. “Humor me.”
Ilima snorted. “When do I do anything but?”
“How about that time you let me go down into the Grand Academy’s basement by myself when Myron dared me—”
“I told you it was haunted and the look on your face when you returned only proved my fears correct.”
“Or the time—”
“All right. All right.” Ilima chortled in a good-natured manner. “I rescind my previous statement, I’m a terrible friend.”
Bemused, they strolled into the building, chuckling in the easy way of life long comrades, faces stretched about impish grins. An old woman looked up from behind a desk, which blocked all but a sliver a space down the hallway. Her hands danced about a ball of yellow yarn, knitting, even as she appraised them with open hostility.
Enk’s laughter faltered, then Ilima’s did a second later.
“Forgive me, my Lords,” the old woman said in a voice so dry that it could shear flesh, “but only paying women are allowed past this table. If you are looking for somewhere to stay, you’ll have to find somewhere else.”
“I think you have mistaken our intention, madam.” Ilima said, gracing her with a boyish smile. “We are looking for someone. Her name is Senet. Is she in?”
“She’s out,” the crone said.
“Don’t you want to check your ledger first?” Enk tapped the leather-bound book on her desk.
“I said she’s out, and before you ask, I have no idea when she’ll be back, so best be on your way . . . my Lords.”
“Let’s go,” Ilima said, dragging Enk back toward the door.
“We will be back!” Enk shouted over his shoulder.
“Don’t bother,” the old woman replied with an air of boredom.
Tearing his hand free from Ilima’s grip, Enk stumbled out the door. “Do you believe her? She thought we were—”
“Can you blame her?” Ilima said, his tone trill with repressed amusement. “She must get plenty of young wolves trying to sneak into her henhouse.”
Jalloh approached them, eyes twinkling, mouth grinning. “No luck?” he asked. “I should have warned you, the mistress of this place is a rotten egg. She’s been that way since I was a youth, and she was old even then. I would think she has a touch of the Mutna bloodline if she wasn’t so ugly.” He shook his head. “What now?”
“The butcher shop,” Enk said. “Take us to the butcher shop.”
“It’s down this way.” The smile faded from Jalloh’s lips as he gestured. “It will be quicker if we go by foot.”
Ilima motioned to Obares, his gray-headed carriage driver, and they were off, following Jalloh, ducking around day laborers, who scuttled about the street, unloading large sacks from nearby wagons.
Once again Enk’s and Ilima’s finery drew unkind looks, but those soon waned as they left the boardinghouse behind and joined the flow of foot traffic moving toward a squall of unseen voices. Yells. Shouts. Angry accusations made incomprehensible by distance and disharmony.
“You might be right about the riots,” Enk told Ilima.
The dark-haired boy nodded, but appeared none too happy about this fact. He kept a hand firmly on the hilt of his sword.
The swell of humanity grew thicker, and they were forced to shove past a few of the more recalcitrant members of the cursing crowd, slowly working their way to the fore. Enk wiped the sweat from his brow, his ears ringing with the raw passions of the mob-like assembly.
A score of Peacebringers shifted in front of the small butcher shop, armed with muskets tipped with bayonets. Captain Utu Levin stood behind the line of grim lawmen, snarling at the swelling masses. He caught sight of Enk and froze, then flashed him a predatory grin.
The young scion swallowed. The keening roar of the mob grew louder, and rotten foodstuffs were hurled, slinking disaster closer with every tomato that ruptured against a Peacebringer’s face or a shoulder.
“We need to leave,” Jalloh hissed, retreating from the fore. “Now!”
“No,” Ilima said, clutching Enk’s arm. “We have to stop this before it turns into a massacre.”
Enk looked into Ilima’s frantic eyes. “What? What can we do about this?”
“Me? Nothing. But. . . . I know what I said before about using your . . . and I still believe what I said, but if you don’t use it now hundreds will die. And it won’t stop here. The way things are the riots will spread. Dilgan will burn. ”
“Take aim,” Utu shouted, and the Peacebringers lowered their muskets, pointing their bayonets at the crowd.
“Enk, do something!” Ilima yelled.
Everything was confusion, the warm press of bodies, the reek of unwashed flesh, the roar of raised voices. Enk tumbled, a leaf on a whirlpool, pushed forward by the turbulence of the enraged throng, hurled toward the glittering points of steel.
He opened what was closed, trying to encompass all those behind him. His inner light fluttered, even as it frayed his insides. There were too many minds—minds like obsidian knives, cutting, cutting. . . .
Run—
He sensed himself unravel, sensed his knees slap the cobblestone.
R-Runaway!
The distorted roar of a discharged musket. Points of fiery lights jumping across a menagerie of grotesque sights. And above it all, the pitched screams of hundreds, fleeing, scattering in every direction but forward.
Enk spat a glob of blood onto the ground, unable to do more the gape at the upwelling of unearthly pain. His head felt pressed between the tightening thighs of the earth. Hands caught him—Ilima’s hands—lifted him back to his feet, dragged him away from the butcher shop.
He glimpsed the fleeing multitudes through squinted eyes, saw Jalloh frozen before a girl of about sixteen. Something about the girl’s face tugged at his memory, something about her blonde ponytails and the hint of blue at her temple.
“Senet!” A fly buzz at the edge of his hearing. His own voice, he was almost certain.
The golden-haired girl turned from Jalloh and studied him.
Enk lurched toward her, his hand outstretched. She danced away, and hazy splotches of red tainted his vision. He stumbled and was caught again.
He blinked up at Ilima. “Catch . . . her!”
Ilima released Enk and charged after Senet with Jalloh trailing behind him.
Head still reeling, the young scion followed as quick as he dared, staggering in their general direction. Air soon became a luxury, and he fell further and further behind, losing sight of them as they ducked into an alleyway.
He collapsed against a nearby wall, tasted blood on his tongue and spat out a mouthful of ruby-streaked phlegm.
“Release her!” Ilima’s voice crowed from the alleyway.
Enk panted in vain for more air, then barreled in after his friend, only to crumble to his knees five steps later. Ilima looked over his shoulder, taking Enk in with a quick glance. The dark-haired boy and Jalloh faced five scoundrels, street thugs armed with knives. One of them held Senet captive, holding a large blade to her throat.
“Let me go, Apilsin, you ugly fucker,” Senet yelled. “I told you before I’m not interested.”
Apilsin yanked her head back with a dramatic flair. “My boss ain’t the type you say no to, missy, well you know.”
“No. No. No! You think that was enough times for him?”
The promise of violence blossomed into the form of unsheathed steel, in an edge that gleamed and gleamed. The thugs’ eyes shifted to Ilima’s naked blade, then they met Ilima’s pledge with wolfish smiles and raised knives. Jalloh backed away, ring
ing his hands, glancing over his shoulder.
“Jalloh, who’s this highborn fucker?” Apilsin asked. “Tell him to put that away before he gets hurt.”
“This is your last chance,” Ilima said with unerring calm.
Apilsin’s laughter scored grime-slicked walls. “Is that so? What if I feel like cutting her up a little first, eh?” He pressed his blade deeper into Senet’s throat, left a line that welled scarlet. “What you gonna do then?”
“Enk. . . ?” Ilima said.
Enk groaned, pushed himself upright. He teetered. His head felt like an overripe grape, yet with nary a look, his friend demanded in the way only an ideal could. “Jab your knife into your knee,” he told Apilsin, and the liquid light within scuttled free.
A dark swell of activity. A knife rising. A knife falling. Apilsin screaming, his eyes rounded by the parting of his flesh. Combatants brawling. The lull and stillness that preceded each exhibit of an unfolding sword form.
An absence swallowed the light in every direction that Enk could perceive, swelled into a chaotic maw, deepened into a massive well, panned into a ravine that retreated backward in time. . . .
Chapter Twelve
Unholy Circle
Enk and Merka sit beneath the oak, embracing with the same intensity as a mother and son. Love absent all demand. Giddy with comfort, his heart cavorts with glee. He shifts within her shining arms, regards the spider that hangs from a branch of the mighty tree. Rufus whines at his back, mooning for attention.
“Enk!” a voice howls.
Merka breaks their embrace, turning to face the source of the shout. The six-year-old sees Mother stalking toward them, her cosmetics smeared, her lips and cheeks bruised in the way of abused pears. She seems a billowing tempest, her eyes are so wild.
“Momma,” Enk calls, finding himself on his feet.
“Lady Phebe, what’s wrong?” Merka runs forward, blocking his mother’s path.
“Out of my way!” Mother hisses.
“Lady—”
Phebe backhands Merka, and a thunder-like clap resounds through the air, loud but somehow muffled, as if rising from a bottomless well. Merka sprawls chest first onto the blanket-covered earth.
“Betrayer!” Mother yells, whirling to face her son.
The six-year-old backs away, his confusion giving way to pinching panic. His feet entangles with a root and his back slaps the ground. Rufus surges forth to inhabit the intervening space, snarling and barking, separating an abused mother from her terrified son.
Phebe retreats, and the air is suddenly thick, syrupy with the reek of rotten peaches. The little scion’s stomach boils for the hold of invisible shackles. He watches his mother pick up his toy soldier, watches her smash it against the dirt, watches wood crack and splitter. . . .
“I’ll never forgive you!” she screams as the gardeners rush toward her. “Do you hear me? Never!”
■■■
In between realms, Enk hung, neither quite awake nor asleep.
For more than ten years, he had been revisited by the same memory and found himself hobbled anew. Every time was like the first time. The essential truths glimpsed would spark the kernel that would climb from his bones to his fingertips, roots inky with nightmarish truths. And he would wonder, as he always did, at the gap that divided what was from what could have been.
As a youth he and his mother had often played kriegshra—an ancient wargame, famed for its ability to teach battlefield tactics. She would recline next to him and exclaim as the clatter of dice filled his bedchamber. Careful to keep the excitement muted, for his ailment would flare at the slightest urging, they would compete from dawn to evening, each striving for an always elusive victory.
Those had been transcendent days.
“Enk. . . ?” called a soft voice.
Enk croaked open his eyes, stared at Senet standing in the doorway of a stark bedchamber. She wore a simple gray dress, embroidered with roses along the neckline. Aside from the touch of blue hair at her temple, only her eyes were extraordinary. Eyes like sapphires looking up from the depths of a tranquil lake.
“I heard crying,” Senet continued, shutting the door behind herself.
“Where am I?” he asked, touching his head. It throbbed like the base of a beaten gong.
He lay upon a lumpy mattress, one much smaller than the one on which he spent most of his nights. Neatly folded clothes lay on a wooden chair beside the bed, looped with a sword-belt. A metal jug glistened with condensation on top of a knee-high table pressed against the wall. A sheer red curtain swayed over the room’s only window.
“The Dancing Bell,” Senet said, perching birdlike on the edge of the bed, thin arms wrapping about her legs. “You fainted and your friend brought you back here. Do you want me to get him?”
“No!” Enk winced. Softer. “No.”
“You were weeping, won’t you?”
“Nightmare. It was a nightmare.” He batted the moisture from his eyes.
“Enk . . . that is your name right?”
He nodded, then regretted it as the chamber spun.
“How did you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
Enk sat up and the brown coverlet tumbled from his neck, revealing his lack of clothes. He suffered a pang of abashment, realizing that someone had undressed him before placing him in the bed.
“I helped, you know?” She grinned slyly.
“You what?”
“I helped undress you.” Senet rocked back and forth, almost humming, her smile widening. “You have a big one. I didn’t expect it, not with you being so tiny and all. And I’ve seen lots. All the girls were quite impressed, and they’ve seen more than me.”
Enk’s face burned. The wheezing peal of Senet’s laughter trilled the air between them, marbling shadows into almost patterns—into images that swam and danced. Mouths gaping. Faces leering.
“You turn the most scandalous shade of pink when you’re mortified,” she said, crawling catlike across the bed, her sapphire eyes sparkling. “Has anyone else ever told you that?”
“I. . . .” Enk clenched his teeth.
“I’m just teasing you a little.” She lay down beside him with the slack serenity of someone contemplating mischievous thoughts, the outer edges of her lips cocked in an impish smirk. Yet there was something about the area around her eyes that spoke of dark undercurrents, of hidden tensions. “Now, answer my question. You said, ‘jab your knife into your knee.’ And Apilsin did just like that.”
“I. . . .” he repeated.
“I-I?” Laughing, she ran a fingertip along his exposed nipple. “Please tell me you have more to say than that.”
Enk shivered. He felt unbalanced, yet he saw what she was doing, saw the budding fringe of her machinations. After all, had he not learned from the Whore of Dilgan herself? He clasped Senet’s hand in his own, flipping it over to study her palm.
“You have the softest little fingers,” he whispered, staring into her eyes. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
Senet tore her limb free with a kicking hiss that spun her off the bed.
Enk chuckled past the fire in his head.
“I was wrong about you,” she said, finding her feet. “You wear innocence like a second face, but it’s only a mask, isn’t it? I had thought you a little kinder, but now that I look closer, I can see it in your eyes—the hurt that makes you want to hurt others.”
“Do you want to know what I see?” he spat past a smile he now found difficult to maintain.
“No . . . I don’t.”
Enk peered down at hands that had become a conduit for metaphor, flinched from the accumulation of dark revelations. Perhaps it was impossible to be an absolutely faithful soul. “Why did you run away from your mother?” he asked as she opened the door. “Why were those men after you?”
“There are only two types of men in this world: takers and those that have yet to become takers,” Senet said. “Now, get dressed. Rooms are only for p
aying customers.” The door clanked close behind her.
Head ringing ever so slightly, Enk donned his clothes and fastened on his sword-belt. He glanced at himself in a small mirror. Splotches of red rimmed the whites of his eyes and the old bruise still gleamed on his cheek, though less grimly.
Sleep. I need sleep.
When Enk descended the staircase, faces lifted to gaze at him—Minna and Senet chatting quietly at a table, luminous, female pearls cleaning furniture, and Ilima nursing a mug at the bar.
“I was just about to go up and see you myself,” Ilima said, pushing Enk into a seat at the bar, “but Senet said you were on the way down.”
“What did I miss?” Enk asked.
“Another one,” Ilima told Jalloh, then clapped Enk’s back. “Not much to be honest. After you fainted, they pretty much ran away.”
Jalloh slammed a mug down in front of Enk. “Your friend is being modest. They only ran away after he tore bloody ribbons from their hides. I’ve never seen someone so quick with the blade.”
“That’s Ilima for you, he’s a wonder.” Enk took a sip from his mug and grimaced at the bitterness. Failure always tasted as such, never got any sweeter.
Ilima shrugged away the compliment. Praise like miracles meant nothing when they were commonplace. “What now? What’s our next step?”
The shuttered windows glowed orange with the last of the fading light, heralding the starry-skyed gloom that would soon descend, blackening streets.
“Home,” Enk whispered, contemplating his mug.
Yet there was no longer such a place for him, it existed only in his mind.
A flame without heat.
A phantom light.
■■■
The constellations twinkled in the sky, shining remnants piercing an obsidian veil.
Enk altered his course, shifting to glance back. Framed by black-iron, Ilima’s distant figure seemed immovable seated in his carriage. Such was the power of memory. He waved, and the carriage rolled away, obscuring radiance.
This was the way of things. The light always gave way to the dark.
Mindripper Page 8
