Emissary

by Melissa McShane

  Genedirou was entreating Sukman for a boon. She could sense his mind, chaotic and unformed, merging with the god’s, for the moment completely insane. He wanted Sukman to touch the world, just here, just now, fill this one spot with his madness. And Sukman agreed.

  She felt Sukman’s attention turn to the little knot. It broke apart under His touch, the threads unwinding in a chaotic dance that ended with their ends waving free like the fronds of an undersea plant. Sukman’s presence withdrew and the pressure behind her eyes dropped to nothing. Free from the restraint of His presence, she looked more closely. The fine threads were nearly invisible, but as she watched, she saw two of them entwine again, and the glow grew infinitesimally stronger.

  Gerrard said, “What’s wrong?” She looked up at him, further up than normal, and realized she had sat down on one of the benches. She felt dizzy. So that was what it was like to be in the presence of a god. “Did you feel any of that?” she asked him.

  “I felt as though my ears needed to pop.”

  “I want to talk to Genedirou.”

  “Genedirou? He’s not going to be in a position to talk to anyone for a while. Still lightheaded from those drugs, I’d guess.”

  “Sukman was there, part of Him anyway. It was...indescribable.” She shook her head. “I think the apparitions are spirits, or partly spirit, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. The important thing is that Genedirou’s not doing what he thinks he’s doing. I don’t think his banishments are a permanent cure.”

  “Does he not know, or not care?”

  “I’d...rather give him the benefit of the doubt. Either way, he’s got to be stopped. Refine his ritual, whatever. Who knows what could happen if an apparition he supposedly banished returned?”

  “Panic, if that mob outside the temple is any indication.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  With Gerrard’s help, Zerafine stood and approached Genedirou. Someone had brought him his robe and he leaned heavily on Rovalt’s arm. He looked as if he’d wrestled ten men the size of Gerrard. “Genedirou,” she said, and when she had his attention, she saluted him. “That was impressive. It was certainly not what I expected.”

  “I live to serve our city,” he replied. “I hope you understand that.” There seemed to be a double meaning to his words that Zerafine couldn’t understand. Did he know she’d been watching?

  “I understand many things now,” she said. “We will speak more later. You clearly need time to recover.”

  She turned away before he could respond. It was possible he didn’t know what he was doing, but by the look in his eye, he knew more about the apparitions than he was willing to admit.

  Chapter Nine

  But Genedirou wasn’t available later that day; he was out performing another banishment. He was also gone the next morning. When they returned in the afternoon, Rovalt told them Genedirou wasn’t in the temple. He was lying.

  “I don’t know why, but he’s avoiding me,” Zerafine said. They stood in the shade of a booth across from the temple, enjoying a cool drink. “I assume that means he knows his banishments are temporary and is afraid I’ll intervene.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t want to discuss his sacred ritual with you. It did summon a god, after all.”

  “He knows he’s doing something wrong, and I intend to find out what.”

  “You’ll worry away at him like a terrier is what you’ll do. Though I don’t like the man, so I don’t know why you shouldn’t.”

  “I have to catch him first.” Zerafine finished her drink and handed the cup back to the stall keeper, who took it warily, but at least didn’t throw it away to prevent her contaminating his next customer. “I’m tired of trying to wait him out. There’s another approach I want to try.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Baz. I want to see if I can learn anything more from him—it—now that I’ve seen what to look for. And if Baz doesn’t show up, we can talk to Solina again and see if he’s appearing on a schedule.”

  “You’re not going to recreate that ritual, are you?” Gerrard looked horrified.

  “I’m not quite brave enough to dance naked in front of a hundred sailors, so no,” she said. “Besides, it would be blasphemous to try to reach the apparition with some other god’s ritual. No, I’m going to try approaching it like a consolation. The symbolic part, anyway.”

  “And that’s not blasphemous?”

  “I’m not going to invoke the god, I’m just going to see if it responds to symbols that aren’t invested with a god’s presence. You suggested that Genedirou might have just stumbled on something that works. I’m wondering if what he stumbled on was the secret of getting an apparition’s attention, the symbolic part, and Sukman’s involvement was something he came up with later.”

  “That doesn’t explain how Sukman, through Genedirou, was able to affect the apparition.”

  “One mystery at a time. If I can learn something through Baz, that’s one more piece of information I can use on Genedirou.”

  “Or against him.”

  Zerafine remembered the exhausted, half-naked thelos in the garden. “I’d like to avoid being his antagonist. If we’re going to fight, let it be his fault. I almost feel sorry for him.”

  It was a good day for a long walk. The sky was partly overcast, dimming the sun’s rays, and a cool breeze found its way between buildings now and again. Their route took them through a residential neighborhood raucous with children’s shouts and the sound of men and women calling out greetings to one another from their doorsteps. The noise was enough that the sounds of real, terrified shouting didn’t register with Zerafine until a woman’s scream shattered the air.

  They ran toward the sound of the screaming, pushing through increasing numbers of people, until they burst into a part of the street that was completely clear. Clear, except for a woman screaming and wringing her hands, and a man curled on the street, pelted repeatedly by seicorum the size of a man’s doubled fist flung about by a ghost. An enormous, enraged ghost. Right, my actual job, Zerafine thought, disoriented.

  Gerrard cursed and pounded toward the ghost, sliding across the cobbles for the last few feet and using his weight and momentum to push the man out of the thing’s range. Zerafine ran after him, pulling her hood over her head and saying a few curses herself; he was completely unarmored, hadn’t so much as worn his seicorum helmet since they’d arrived in Portena. Gerrard had landed on his knees and had his arms over his head, but held his ground. As long as the ghost had a target, it wouldn’t try to attack anyone else. She leaped over him and reached out to embrace the ghost with her arms.

  It was furious. She’d never seen such anger, such passion, from a ghost before. It fought her, its body of gigantic seicorum stones flying past with such force she had a moment’s fear, against all reason, that her cloak would not be enough to protect her. That momentary lapse sent it flailing wildly in all directions, and she had to breathe deeply, once, twice, a third time, to regain her control.

  Its memories were so fragmented that at first they made no sense: flashes of color and sound only, nothing coherent. It was like trying to reassemble one of Sukman’s windows, all irregular pieces, none of them seeming to match. Sukman. Intuitively, but counter to logic, she drew the silver spiral in her mind and turned it gold. She would never, never have used this symbol, which should have driven a ghost mad, or madder. Yet in her mind she held it out, willing the ghost to see it as an acknowledgement of its pain and fury. The storm abated just enough for her heart’s eye to catch hold of a memory more solid than the others, a memory of satin sheets—but nothing more. Carefully, she used the spiral to seek out memories that connected to the first: guilt, fear, anger, pain. The woman had died in agony, some illness her people couldn’t afford to ease, or an illness with no possible relief. She had been mistress to many different men over the years, a woman kept in luxury, discarded when sickness began to show itself on her body. Her name was Zenia.

>   Zerafine could not bind all Zenia’s shattered pieces together, but what she could do was enough. She gave her Kalindi’s peace, Kandra’s blessing, and the triple arch that would take her to Atenas’s court. She imagined the woman’s relief; the consolation had been as much a promise of merciful judgment as the offer of a path home, and it was Zenia’s irrational fear of what awaited her at Atenas’s hands as much as the pain of her death that had created a ghost.

  Chunks of seicorum struck the cobblestones in a sharp, rattling rain. She let out a sigh and calmed herself, wiped her eyes; her hands were trembling. Then she pushed back her hood, wondering why Gerrard didn’t move, and found him lying at her feet, blood running down the side of his face, unconscious. Nacalia darted in and wrapped herself around his waist, sobbing.

  “Somebody find me a healer!” Zerafine shouted, dropping to her knees and checking his pulse, her own pulse hammering in her ears. Yes, unconscious but alive, thank Atenas. The stone had caught him just behind the ear. She saw that the ghost’s victim was in even worse shape; the screaming woman had flung herself over him and was keening a different note now. Zerafine left Gerrard and pushed the woman aside, checking the man’s head and body, feeling his wrist. Alive—injured, a few bones probably broken, but alive. No new ghosts would be created this day—at least, not if the healer came quickly.

  “Quickly!” she shouted at Nacalia, because it looked as though every onlooker in that crowd had been turned to stone. Nacalia started, then leaped to her feet and ran off. Zerafine cradled Gerrard’s head in her lap and willed him to wake up. He looked white under the sunburn and she could barely see his chest rise and fall with his breathing. He’ll be fine, she told herself, this is nothing, but her hand ached and when she looked at it, she realized she was gripping the front of his tunic so tightly the blood had stopped flowing to her fingers.

  It felt like forever before Nacalia pushed her way back through the crowd, leading a man and a woman in green and blue tunics. Two healers. What a stroke of luck. They conferred quickly, and then the man, who bore Kalindi’s sun on the back and front of his tunic, laid his hands on the ghost’s victim’s head and threw his head back in prayer. Zerafine had never wished so hard for the sun to come out just then, blessing his work, but he seemed capable of managing on his own.

  The woman, whose robe was unmarked, felt Gerrard’s pulse, turned his head to see where the seicorum stone had struck him, lifted his eyelids to look at his pupils. Just then he groaned and twitched away from her hand. Zerafine felt an enormous weight lift from her chest. “Did you get it?” he asked hoarsely.

  “I did, no thanks—no thanks to your big dumb ox body getting in my way,” she said, feeling a tear slide down her cheek, quickly wiping it away before it could fall on his face.

  His eyelids fluttered. “You’re sort of blurry,” he said.

  “That’s because you’ve had your brains rattled a bit,” said the healer. “Do you feel dizzy? Nauseated? Have a headache?”

  “Of course I have a headache, I got hit in the head by a lump of seicorum the size of my fist. Have you seen the size of my fist?”

  Zerafine laughed. It was only a little wobbly.

  “If he can make jokes, he’s probably going to be fine,” the healer said. “But stay there for a minute, sirrah. I want to see how bad that cut is.”

  Gerrard lay there long enough that Zerafine’s legs started to go numb. The cut turned out to be small but bloody, easy enough for the healer to deal with. Finally she allowed him to stand. It took both of them to get Gerrard to his feet, and he wavered a little bit, enough that Zerafine inserted herself under his arm to give him support. Not that her short frame would make much difference if he decided to go down again. But he seemed stable enough.

  “Keep him awake,” the healer told Zerafine, “and if he starts feeling sick or dizzy, or has trouble keeping his balance, get him to one of Kalindi’s theloi. I’d say let Jerontius take care of it now, but I’m afraid my colleague is exhausted.” They all looked at the little man with the suns on his tunic, who sat on the curb looking more ill than his patient, who was lying on the ground talking emphatically with some of the members of the crowd. He stopped talking long enough to look at Gerrard, then struggled to his feet. The healer tried to make him sit, but the man persisted.

  “You saved my life. I can’t begin to repay that debt. Thank you, thank you,” he said, clasping Gerrard about the shoulders. The woman—his companion, possibly his wife, held out a heavy sack. “They all helped gather it up for you. You’re all right, yes? I can’t believe you were willing to pull me out of there, and at such a cost to you! You’re not badly injured, I hope?”

  “I’m fine,” Gerrard said. By the still-ashy cast to his skin, he was lying. He took the bag filled with seicorum and said, “Half of this is yours, by right.”

  The man flushed and stepped back. “I couldn’t possibly take it. I can’t allow myself to benefit from simply being in the wrong place when it showed up. Perhaps the healers...?”

  “Good idea,” Gerrard said. He dug through the pouch until he found something he liked. “Look,” he grunted, and showed the stone to Zerafine. One corner of the irregular chunk was stained dark with blood. “I’m keeping this one.” Zerafine grimaced.

  Gerrard then approached the healers and gave them each a large handful of seicorum, which turned out to be a double handful for them. He tucked the bag with its remaining contents into his belt. “Excuse us,” he rumbled, and led Zerafine through the crowd. Nacalia followed close behind, her hand gripping the hem of Gerrard’s tunic.

  “Sorry,” he said when they’d left everything behind. “I’m just feeling a little—dizzy.” He tottered over to sit on the rim of a convenient fountain. He used some of the water to splash his head. Pale red trails of water ran down his scalp and into the neck of his tunic.

  “We need to get you to a divine healer,” Zerafine said, but he shook his head, and winced.

  “No, I was only dizzy because there were so many people there,” he replied. “I’m going to be fine. The nice healer said so.”

  “We should go back home and do this another day.”

  “And give me time to think of reasons why we shouldn’t? You really want that?”

  “What I want is a sentare who isn’t going to pass out on the docks.”

  “At least you’d have a crane handy to get me up again.”

  “Could you take this seriously, please?”

  “Zerafine, I am taking this seriously. I’m not stupid and I’m not foolhardy. If I thought I was in the least bit incapacitated, I would be the first to go to a thelos for healing. Could you stop behaving like a mother hen?”

  Zerafine, stung, retorted, “You didn’t have to see yourself lying there with blood all over your head and a face like death! You scared the life out of me! I thought—” She stopped, feeling the tears well up again.

  Gerrard looked at her, then reached out to hold her close. “I’m an idiot,” he murmured into her hair. “I’m a big dumb ox. Forgive me.”

  Zerafine nodded into his chest. He was large and warm and solid and she felt at peace for the first time in—how long had it even taken? An hour? Five minutes? She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him.

  “I’ll stop mothering you,” she said, wiping her eyes, “if you swear you won’t push yourself and you’ll tell me if you start feeling strange.”

  He held her tighter. “Promise.”

  Something about the way he said it made her feel awkward, and she stepped away. “I do feel hungry,” he added. “But that’s not strange, for me.”

  She laughed a little too loudly, trying to cover up her discomfort. “Nacalia, find us something to eat,” she said. But as they walked along, eating roast lamb off wooden skewers, she had a hard time not keeping an eye on her sentare.

  Chapter Ten

  Baz wasn’t on the pier and Solina wasn’t in the dock master’s house. A little asking around turned up a sailor who said t
hat she’d gone into town on an errand and should return shortly. They decided to do some shopping in one of the nearby markets, its booths crammed with goods from all corners of the known world. Gerrard found a new belt to replace the one he’d been wearing for two years. Zerafine wavered between an ivory hair clasp and a pair of delicate earrings of interlocking golden rings. In the end, she bought both, even though Gerrard had to change some of their seicorum for money to pay for them. She put the earrings on immediately, enjoying the way they tinkled when she turned her head. She considered buying Nacalia a present, seeing how avidly the girl eyed a stall selling necklaces of beaten bronze, but remembered her conversation with Gerrard about Nacalia’s prospects when they left, and decided against it. Instead, she bought her an overpriced cone of toasted pine nuts.

  “It’s strange,” Gerrard said as they left the market. He weighed his coin pouch before tucking it securely away. “I got a surprisingly good exchange rate for the seicorum. The moneychanger seemed eager to have it. Maybe Berenica and her theloi are squirreling it away for the winter.”

  “You’ve seen how Berenica lives. I can’t imagine frugality is in her vocabulary.”

  “Well, the ghost rate can’t have gone down here, or we’d have heard about it.”

  “And ghost hunters are even bigger spenders than Berenica. You’re right, that’s strange.”

  “It’s not like I’m complaining. I always forget how expensive it is to live in a big city. I’d hate to think how much it would cost if we had to rent an apartment, or a house.”

  “Especially since the Council isn’t paying us for this job—did you realize that?” Zerafine sighed. “Let’s see if Solina is back.”

  She wasn’t. They ambled back down to pier 7, still empty of ghosts, ships, sailors, or cargo. Probably everyone knew about Baz. Zerafine took her hood and cowl off and sat on the pier, dangling her feet over the edge. The tide was high enough that the waves flowed over her feet and dampened the hem of her long tunic. With the overcast, the sun was just warm enough to be pleasant rather than broiling. The salt breeze coming off the ocean mingled its briny scent with the hot tang of tar and the stink of ox dung, and Zerafine tipped her head back and closed her eyes. For ten soldi she’d take off her robe and sandals and go wading through the surf.