The Ghosts of Blood and Innocence

by Constantine, Storm

  Once, Loki visited Apanage when he was not expected. He knew that Geburael had gone into the otherlanes, since Loki had asked him to bring back some cheese. Thoughts of the mouth watering flavor of cheese drove Loki into an insane desire to taste it, so when he sensed the shiver in the air that indicated an otherlanes portal opening, he went directly to Apanage to satisfy his craving. Such simple pleasures had become the focus of his existence. The sight of what he found within the tower shocked him more than he would have believed. He saw Geburael and Diablo taking aruna in the middle of the floor of their living space. Loki’s first thought was that is was like watching a clockwork toy that had gone mad. Their union was passionless, mechanical. As soume, Geburael’s eyes were closed, his brow furrowed. He did not look as if he was in the throes of bliss. Loki’s heart contracted. He felt that what he saw was a violation of an act that should be sacred. It was made all the more difficult for him, because it reminded him that he hadn’t taken aruna since that first time with Geburael. His body craved it, but he’d managed to suppress his desires, relying upon satisfying his body’s need himself. It wasn’t enough, however, and Loki found it deeply disturbing to be slightly aroused by what he considered to be a grotesque sight.

  Diablo sensed him standing at the threshold and raised his head. ‘Wait,’ he said. That was all.

  Loki backed out, his heart beating too quickly.

  Later, he hadn’t the heart to go to Apanage for a meal, and eventually Geburael turned up with the cheese. Loki was loath to take it. He felt it was contaminated, having been in the same room as Diablo possessing Geburael, but then perhaps most of the food he’d eaten had been. ‘Next time,’ he said, avoiding Geburael’s eyes, ‘bring it straight to me. Don’t leave it with him.’

  Geburael considered. ‘If you will give me what he does.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Loki said. ‘Even more so now. I can’t. Not after him.’

  Geburael sighed. ‘You wouldn’t anyway, but it was worth a try.’

  When he left, Loki finally gave in to the grief that had condensed inside him. Would he never escape? Could Cal not hear his calls? He wept until he fell asleep exhausted.

  After that, Loki resolved he’d have to find his own food and learn how to cook it. He would just have to take his chances with the Thanax, although he’d come to the conclusion they weren’t as threatening as Geburael had implied. He’d had to argue with Diablo, who was extremely reluctant to give Loki any kind of weapon. Loki only got his own way when he swore he’d starve himself to death, and how would the Hashmallim feel about that? Diablo must have known Loki didn’t really mean that, but eventually gave him a hunting knife, which he could use to cut plants also. ‘Try to use this on me or Geb and I’ll scar you for life,’ Diablo said. ‘You could lose an ear or a hand and the Hashmallim won’t care.’

  Loki said nothing, but took the knife. He had watched Diablo cook often enough to know the rudiments of how to prepare a meal, even down to gutting a small creature. He now went on foraging missions just beyond the towers, to hunt animals and to seek other means of sustenance. The first time he killed a small armored reptile, he was physically sick, but steeled himself to cut it into pieces with the knife. He had to survive. Loki had received little caste training, but found he was able to handle a plant or fungus and discern intuitively whether it was poisonous to his body or not. He had applied himself to flexing his skills, because there was little else to do in this world.

  On one occasion, Loki ventured farther than he ever had before, beyond the shadows of the towers. He walked towards the hill where he and Geburael had first arrived in Thannaril. There seemed nothing to fear.

  Once he’d scrambled to the top of the cliffs, there were several pathways that snaked off between the rocks. The landscape was quite beautiful. Mineral pools were surrounded by blooms of crystals and salts of different reddish hues. Insects with huge gauzy wings hovered over the waters. Loki squatted down to examine one of the pools, in case there were aquatic creatures within. One of the insects alighted on his shoulder and began to clean its triangular face with threadlike limbs. It weighed nothing at all. The surface of the pool was glassy, almost too perfect to be water. It looked hard. Loki reached out to touch it, but at that moment he saw in reflection that he was not alone. Quickly, he jumped to his feet and turned. The insect flew away from his shoulder, uttering a thin humming squeak. Behind him were three Thanax, perhaps the three he had seen on arriving in Thannaril. They had crept upon him in utter silence. Up close, they looked terrifying; like hara, but not — emaciated and feverish. They were so dark, and yet not black. It was as if they were hara-shaped holes in reality. At once, Loki surrounded himself with a protective aura of cold. He began to back away.

  ‘Don’t fear,’ one of the Thanax said. He held out a skeletal hand.

  Another glided forward. ‘We are so cold, just that. So cold. Share your warmth with us.’ He blinked his dead black eyes.

  ‘Get back,’ Loki said, without much conviction. He was astonished they could speak his language.

  ‘The cold is hurtful,’ said the first. ‘You are good. I see that in you. Share your warmth with us.’

  ‘No,’ Loki said. ‘I can’t do that. It’ll hurt me.’

  The first Thanax sighed and his companions went to his side and pressed against him. They looked so forlorn, Loki experienced a pang of pity. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Where do you come from? You speak a language of Earth. You look sort of… harish. Are you har?’

  The first Thanax disengaged himself from his companions. ‘The others have never asked us that,’ he said. ‘They want to kill us, even though we are not strictly alive. But that is because they guard their warmth jealously. We are not thieves. We want only to be warm. Would you deny us that? We are the half-born, the unrealmed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Loki asked. ‘Are you har or not?’

  ‘We are history,’ said the Thanax. ‘When Wraeththu incept a human, a harish spirit is born. If the body dies, as it often does, the spirit has no home but here. We are the failed inceptions, and more. We are the murdered, the suicides and the great leaders who fell.’

  ‘We are forever cold,’ said another. ‘We go into the paths to find warmth. We listen for the calls of magicians, and ride on the tails of invocations. We are those who hide amongst the cloaks of gods and elementals. But always we return here, for this is the warmest of all realms to us. In others, the cold is beyond bearing, and we freeze into pillars of stone.’

  Loki’s first thought at this information was: Trust Diablo to find this place. But his second was that of compassion. ‘Can’t you find other bodies, new souls to inhabit?’

  ‘Inceptions are few now,’ said the first Thanax.

  ‘But hara are born, as harlings,’ Loki said. ‘Couldn’t you find flesh through them?’

  The Thanax regarded one another thoughtfully, then their apparent leader said, ‘We don’t know how. You have been courteous to us, so I’ll tell you this: Some of us are very angry, and envious of those with warmth. You should avoid the envious.’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve seen any of you since I first arrived,’ Loki said. He paused. ‘I wish I could help you, but I’m a prisoner here. I’m sure my hara could do something for you, but I don’t think any of them know you exist. If I ever get home, I’ll make sure they know.’

  The Thanax inclined their heads to him, and it was in Loki’s mind to offer them some warmth, then he thought better of it. Perhaps their apparent meekness merely hid their voracious need and once he lowered his defenses, they’d fall on him like locusts. ‘Could you help me leave here?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said the Thanax in unison.

  Loki wasn’t sure if that word implied ‘won’t’ or ‘can’t’. ‘Then I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘If you think of anything to help me, you know where I am.’ He steeled himself to turn his back on the Thanax and walked away from them.

  When Loki returned to Ninzini, he found Gebu
rael waiting for him, in a curiously agitated state. ‘I’ve heard something,’ Geburael said, ‘something very important.’

  ‘What?’ Loki asked, fearful that Geburael had spied on his encounter with the Thanax, which he had intended to keep secret.

  ‘A cry,’ Geburael said. ‘It was a cry of our blood.’

  Loki went cold, a dozen unwelcome images of death and injury flooding his mind. ‘What do you mean? Who?’

  ‘I thought it was you,’ Geburael said.

  Loki had never seen the har so discomposed. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Was it Cal or Pellaz?’

  Geburael shook his head. ‘No, I could tell it wasn’t. It was a har in distress. A young har. He called for help, and it felt like you. Loki…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have another brother?’

  ‘Only Abrimel. Was it him?’

  Again, Geburael shook his head. ‘I’d know my father.’ He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘It has made me feel… very strange. I have not told Diablo.’

  This disclosure changed things in Loki’s mind. ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating some of the cushions Geburael had brought for him. ‘I’ll heat water.’ Loki had also been experimenting with hot drinks. He’d found a dry wizened fruit that when crushed in hot water, and mixed with sugar and nutmeg, tasted rather like spiced coffee. It smelled rancid, but the familiar ritual of drinking it made Loki feel more at home.

  Geburael sat down. He sighed, and his whole body shuddered. ‘The cry hit me like a flying fist,’ he said. ‘It shook me.’

  Loki took some of his coffee figs, as he called them, and began crushing them with a pestle and mortar, another request that Geburael had fulfilled for him. He thought about what Geburael had said. ‘Why didn’t you tell Diablo?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Yet you’ve told me.’

  ‘Yes. It had to be you. Loki… do you know about the stolen pearl?’

  Loki knew very little, since his family and tutors had kept the information from him. From friends less sheltered than he, Loki had heard whispers about how his hura Rue had been attacked while he was with pearl. It was not exactly something a young har would read about in history books. ‘Yes,’ Loki said. ‘Sort of.’

  Geburael took a breath. ‘Diablo took the pearl.’

  Loki’s first instinct was to hit Geburael, which quickly subsided before he could act on it. ‘Diablo,’ he said, deadpan.

  Geburael nodded. ‘He was meant to kill it, but didn’t succeed. It was taken from him. It wasn’t dead. I think… I think the cry I heard was him, your brother. I can’t tell Diablo because it’s his purpose to kill that harling. I can’t let that happen; he is part of you. He’s not Aralisian, because he doesn’t know who he is. When I heard him, I felt empathy, as I did with you.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the earthly realm, I could tell that much, but not precisely where. It was a place unknown to me. Loki, I couldn’t do anything to harm him. It would be like harming you. I couldn’t do that.’ He put his hands over his face.

  Loki bowed his head. He wasn’t sure what to think, but one thing was radiantly clear: Geburael was in love with him. If it wasn’t for that love, perhaps Diablo would have been told of the cry. ‘You were right in telling me,’ Loki said. ‘We need to know who took the pearl from Diablo, and why, since they never returned it to Immanion. The har it held will be right around about the same age as us. Can you contact him?’

  ‘The cry was brief,’ Geburael said, lowering his hands, ‘then it was silenced, like a blanket was thrown over it. Still, it entered my body through the heart. I can’t go back to Apanage yet. Diablo will sense it in me.’

  ‘Stay here,’ Loki said. ‘Let him think we’re together in the way you desire. He’d believe that story.’

  ‘He’ll come looking for me.’

  ‘Stay here,’ Loki said. ‘I meant it. Sleep beside me if you need that long away from him. If he turns up, we can act. He won’t disturb us, will he? Is he jealous?’

  ‘No. He thinks I should have just forced you. He’s not jealous.’

  ‘Good.’ Loki ran the bitter smelling fragments of the coffee figs through his fingers. ‘Geb… thank you for not forcing me.’

  Geburael shrugged.

  ‘Anyway…’ Loki tried to adopt a carefree tone. ‘Try my Thannaril coffee, you might like it.’

  Geburael wrinkled his nose a little. ‘OK,’ he said.

  As he continued his preparations, it occurred to Loki that Geburael could simply disappear into the otherlanes for a while. Diablo wouldn’t question that either, and it would be easy to make up some story about how he’d gone to get Loki something from the earthly realm. Yet neither Loki nor Geburael had suggested it, and even now, something held Loki’s tongue. He wasn’t sure what exactly. The thought of lying beside Geburael made him feel angry and pleased at the same time, as if he wanted to torment Geburael. Did he desire power over another so much? Was it a cruel kind of revenge? He hoped Diablo’s rotten presence hadn’t corrupted him somehow.

  When Geburael tasted Loki’s drink, he said, ‘It’s not too bad.’

  ‘I left out the sugar and the spice,’ Loki said.

  ‘Considerate of you.’

  Loki rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah.’

  At that moment, Geburael tensed. He put down his cup. ‘He’s coming. He’s sniffing me out. He knows something’s happened. He’s climbing the stairs.’

  Loki said nothing, but pulled Geburael towards him, wrapping him in his arms.

  There is no way to pretend sharing breath, it just happens. In the inky swirls of Geburael’s soul, Loki received impressions of their time together in Freygard. He remembered, and was grateful for the fact he hadn’t known about Diablo at that time. Had feybraiha changed him also?

  Diablo came into the room, and Loki tried to immerse himself in Geburael’s breath. Think only of me, Geb. Remember us. Keep him out.

  Diablo laughed, in a sly humorless way, but at least he left the tower. In the heightened perception of breath-sharing, Loki heard Diablo’s creepy footsteps padding away.

  Loki drew away from Geburael, wiped his mouth. ‘He’s gone. We convinced him. He fell for it.’

  Geburael smiled wistfully. ‘So did I,’ he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  As soon as the Aralisians returned from Freygard, the Chancellor of the Hegemony, Tharmifex Calvel, requested Pellaz to meet with him in the private offices of the Hegalion. When Pellaz arrived there, he found that the ubiquitous Velaxis Shiraz was also present, as well as Eyra Fiumara, who looked harried, as if Tharmifex had recently upbraided him. Eyra was dressed in his official Arch Listener robes, which suggested he’d recently come from a meeting with his staff. Pellaz had barely slept for the past few days. He was full of self-recrimination, confusion and a certain amount of numbness, which was the worst thing of all. Perhaps he was destined never to have heirs: they would all be taken from him. Perhaps he should have acknowledged Galdra as Loki’s father all along, and accepted the consequences; now he was being punished for it. Perhaps Loki was dead. Innocent, wide-eyed Loki; a charmed harling. They’d kept him in ignorance, when knowledge might have given him some protection.

  ‘Pellaz,’ Tharmifex said shortly, as the Tigron closed the door behind him. Cal had wanted to come too, but Tharmifex’s request had been very clear. This did not bode well.

  ‘Matters become serious,’ announced Tharmifex, an imposing figure behind his wide dark wood desk. His dark hair was plaited severely and lay in a gleaming rope over his shoulder. His angular face was expressionless. He wore splendid robes of dark purple velvet embroidered with scarlet metallic thread.

  Pellaz caught Eyra’s eye, sensed an ally, and sat down opposite the Chancellor in the empty seat that had been waiting for him. ‘Before you say what it is you wish to say, there’s something you should know,’ Pellaz said.

  Tharmifex gestured abruptly with both hands. ‘Speak.
’

  ‘Loki was not conceived here in Immanion. It happened at Fulminir.’

  Tharmifex was silent for a moment, while Eyra shifted uncomfortably on his seat and paid more attention than was necessary to arranging the folds of his robe. Velaxis stared at his hands, his face expressionless.

  ‘Galdra har Freyhella is Loki’s father,’ Pellaz said. ‘For obvious reasons, I did not want this fact known. Now I think the Hegemony should be aware of it. Naturally, I expect this revelation to be treated in the strictest confidence.’

  Pellaz could feel Eyra’s embarrassment; the Listener wished he was anywhere but in that office. Velaxis, as usual, was unreadable, though Pellaz couldn’t help thinking the Hegemony Clerk felt smug. Tharmifex, however, smoldered with suppressed annoyance.

  ‘You created a pearl with the Freyhellan,’ Tharmifex said, deadpan. ‘Clearly, you were considering the suggestions that had been put to you concerning Galdra. You did not expect Cal to return to you.’

  ‘That is not the case,’ Pellaz said. ‘The pearl was an accident.’

  ‘Hara don’t have accidental conceptions,’ Tharmifex continued. His eyes looked completely black.

  ‘Well, clearly they do. When involved in the kind of work that Galdra and I undertook, it’s a risk. I was exhausted. I lost control. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘And now Loki has disappeared.’ Tharmifex tapped some papers before him with one hand. ‘I read the report and find it perplexing. Why was no guard placed in Loki’s chamber?’

  ‘There were guards all around the house,’ Pellaz said.

  ‘And yet everyhar was aware of the phenomenon in Freygard which they referred to as…’ Tharmifex flicked through the papers, ‘…the “spirit window.” Did it not occur to any of you that entities might emerge from that portal who could enter premises undetected? We were all at Fulminir, Pell. We all saw the strangest things. We know Cal can traverse the otherlanes without a sedu, and that hara under Ponclast’s command possessed a similar ability. Frankly, I’m aghast security was so lax. Have we learned nothing from what happened to Rue seven years ago when his pearl was taken?’