King of Shards

by Matthew Kressel

  Mama gave her a tender look. “When you were three, I was hanging the wash, just like now, and you’d drawn all over the floor with a piece of charcoal a picture of a woman, with wings. You said, ‘It’s you, Mama.’ It was so beautiful. I didn’t wash the floor for weeks.”

  Mama reached out and stroked Rana’s cheek. “That little girl is all grown up now.” Mama seemed tired, old. “I’m sorry, Rana, but the answer is no.”

  Rana felt sick. “But, why?”

  “Do you think I didn’t dream too? I wanted to visit the southern seas and sail in a great ship. Papa wanted to be a camel racer. But I’ve never been to the sea. And Papa hasn’t ridden a camel in a decade. Rana, in the end, we have to let go of our dreams and do what is right for our future. That means keeping your job. Now help me hang these shirts.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Through a crack in the door, Daniel watched the young woman walk into the adjacent building. He overheard her softly speaking to another woman, possibly older, in their strange language of silken words, like sand sliding over glass.

  “That was writing on the ground,” Daniel whispered to the dog. “Wasn’t it?”

  The dog nodded.

  “So, can you write in English?”

  The dog exhaled a green mist, and the sand formed perfectly shaped English letters, as if a printing press had just imprinted its large Roman typeface into the sand. The words read, I warned you, and you did not listen, and now my power is nearly gone. We are in Gehinnom.

  “Gehinnom? Is that like Gehenna?”

  The dog nodded.

  Daniel laughed nervously. “We’re in Gehenna? Where the dead go to burn off their sins?”

  Do these people look dead to you? the dog blew into the sand. Not dead, but stunted. They cannot rise above the Bronze Age.

  “Gehenna?” Daniel said. “So who are you? The angel Dumah?”

  Here, they call her Mollai. No, I am Adar.

  “So what are you, Adar? Not a man, and not quite a dog either.”

  A demon from Sheol, the oldest of Shards.

  “A demon?” This was quickly growing insane. “So why are we here?”

  To save you from the one whom you call Rebekah.

  His heart panged at the mention of her name. “To save me from my fiancée?”

  She is a demon, like me.

  Daniel sat on the stool beside the table, feeling sick. “This is too much. I think I’m losing my mind.” He rubbed his face. “I’m supposed to be on my honeymoon.”

  Conserve your strength. You will need it.

  “For what?”

  We will soon go up the mountain to rescue a woman, a powerful witch. She has the power to return you home.

  “A witch? To New York?”

  To Earth.

  This was all so damned absurd! “Right, because we’re not on Earth.”

  I told you. We are on Gehinnom, a broken world.

  Daniel was weak, thirsty. He didn’t want to believe any of this, but how could he deny what he’d seen? He looked around the crowded space. Dozens of paintings leaned against the walls, vistas of bizarre cityscapes, jagged mountains, elderly faces, cactus flowers, storm clouds, and dozens more. Though they had been painted using different techniques and in different media, each had a vivid, almost photographic quality. Whoever had painted them was astoundingly talented.

  A squat black furnace protruded from the corner. Its chimney rose through the roof. Blacksmith’s tools leaned against it. On crowded hooks hung metal bracelets, rings, belts, charms, and knives, sparkling with gems. Stacked in a corner were several stringed instruments similar to lutes and psaltery. Some were half-built, unstrung. Drums and flutes of various sizes lay about the floor. On a stone slab, an assortment of awls and chisels lay next to the busts of nine women’s heads. Half had been painted in life-like detail, the others waited.

  In rickety wooden boxes sat a stack of painted bowls. In the far corner, the upper half of a voluptuous woman had been chiseled away from a block of white limestone.

  “Who made all of this stuff?”

  Rana, the girl who was here. She will come with us.

  “To rescue this witch who will get me back to Earth?”

  Yes.

  Daniel shook his head. “You’re the man from the shelter, the one who followed me?”

  Adar nodded.

  “You warned me not to marry Rebekah, or, how did you put it, ‘The cosmos will collapse and all the universes will shatter in a cataclysm to dwarf all cataclysms.’ What did you mean by that? Rebekah has nothing to do with any of this!”

  I am weak, Adar wrote. I need rest, and you should too.

  “Rest? Here?” But despite Daniel’s protests, the dog curled into a ball and would write no more words in the sand.

  He was exhausted. He thought of Rebekah’s smile, her understanding eyes, her laugh. A demon? She could barely cook two eggs without burning them. He giggled at the absurdity of it all. This was all a kind of horrible joke, a bad dream, a hallucination. It had to be. He removed the boutonniere from his lapel and turned it over in his hands. It had begun to desiccate in the dry air. The candle the woman had lit flickered as a wave of exhaustion crept over him.

  Old memories danced within the tiny flame.

  ——

  Danny wakes from a bad dream with a pounding heart. His body drips with sweat. He lies in bed as the buzzing streetlight outside spills pallid orange light into his bedroom. A poster of the solar system and this year’s Yankees line-up adorns the wall. By the window, bathed in streetlight glow, his cockatiel, Isaac, flutters against the bars of his cage. His black shade lies in a loose heap on the floor.

  A creak in the hallway. Danny blinks sleep from his eyes. Mommy always pulls his door closed after she tucks him in, making sure to leave a crack of light around the frame, the way he likes it. But his bedroom door is now open wide, for anyone to enter. The shadows in the hallway seem to push against the orange light, seeking entrance.

  Another creak. Isaac slams against his bars, again and again.

  It’s Mommy or Daddy or Gram, up for a late-night pee. That’s all.

  Baby powder dusts the floor. Mommy always tells Danny to powder himself in the bathroom, but Danny likes the way it falls across his bedroom floor like a dusting of snow. There are footprints in the snow. His, but also others, clawed prints, as if a chicken has circled his bed.

  A dark shape slips past the door, a shadow’s shadow. Even the orange light cannot grasp it, though it tries.

  And its eyes! As sharp and bright as winter stars. They scan the room, but like the blind, they do not really see. The shadow stares right at Danny, then looks away.

  The figure walks down the hall. Danny throws the covers over his head. The creaking pauses. The streetlamp hums. Sleep pulls at him. Just a bad dream. He closes his eyes, thinks of toast. The smell gets stronger, more real. Who’s toasting bread this early? He peers out again.

  The hallway is bright, and the air smells bitter. Wrong.

  “Oh god! Oh god, Danny!” Mommy’s voice, frantic.

  The hallway glows brightly, as if all the lights are on. The walls roll with orange waves, like reflections from a luminous pool. A hundred fiery tendrils spill into the hall. They twist around his bedroom door like growing vines, devouring his walls. The solar system is incinerated. All the Yankees burn. Isaac lies leg-up on the bottom of his cage, as the flames reach him. As a thousand tongues of fire reach for Danny, he screams.

  “Danny!” Daddy, howling.

  Danny calls for Mommy and Daddy and Gram and God. The fires glower maliciously. They know him, and he knows them. These flames were there when he was born, mocking. This is a reunion, of sorts.

  With a terrifying scream, a twisted monster leaps through the burning doorway. Its head is charred and its shoulders trail flames and smoke. The monster grabs a blanket and throws it over Danny. “Pray to God, Danny! The Shema, pray it!”

  He feels like vomiting. This is no monst
er. No, this charred thing is Gram.

  Gram picks him up. Even with closed eyes the flames blind. He will explode, like an egg in the microwave. She wails and stumbles as she hauls Danny through burning hell.

  I’m too young to die, he thinks.

  “Shema yisroayl, adonai elo—” Gram begins, but doesn’t finish the prayer. He is too scared to pray with her.

  The flames roar. His parents scream behind him. But the worst sound of them all is the one that doesn’t make sense, the deep and throaty voice of a woman hysterically laughing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In their communal bedroom, Rana sat in the darkness, pondering the demon’s words. Between Papa’s snores and the chorus of singing locusts outside, she could have shouted and no one would have heard. Mama’s lips were thin, like a mortise joint, and her breaths had become long and slow. Even so, it was difficult to tell if she was truly sleeping.

  Liu lay awake in her crib, wrapped snugly in blankets, and stared out the alcove at the waxing crescent moon rising slowly above the DanBaer. The moon spilled white light all over her face. Liu pointed to the moon and said to Rana, “See the light?”

  Mama smacked her lips and turned on her side.

  “Hush,” Rana whispered. “Hush now, Little Bean.”

  Liu smiled mischievously.

  Mama snored. Along with Papa, the two harmonized an impromptu snorting rhythm.

  I have to leave, Rana thought. Mama will hate me for dis-obeying her, and Papa will skin me alive when I return. But I have to do this. If there was a chance that Marul was still alive, however small, Rana would never forgive herself if she didn’t go.

  She whispered to Liu, “Promise to be good while I’m gone?”

  Liu pointed at Rana’s chest and said, “See the light?”

  “Yes, the moonlight spills on me.”

  “You,” Liu said, pointing adamantly. “The light!”

  Her parents stirred, but their snores soon harmonized again. She kissed Liu on the forehead. “Dream well, sister,” she said. “And go with Mollai.” She rose from the bed and quietly collected supplies from the far corners of the house. It took a while, because she considered bringing every knickknack she stumbled upon in the house, until she eventually thought better of it. Perhaps she was saying goodbye to them all. Then, with two large satchels heavy on her shoulders, she snuck out the door into the night.

  What Mama could never understand, what Rana could never tell her, was how much Marul meant to her. To tell Mama the truth would break her heart. Marul Menacha was the promise of a grand tomorrow, of untold lands and distant adventures. While Mama, as much as Rana loved her, was the paragon of an unfulfilled life.

  She opened the door of her workshop, half expecting the demon and his friend to be gone, that she had dreamed the whole encounter. But the man was dozing on a stool with his arms crossed, looking watersick. She found herself oddly relieved that he remained. He stumbled awake when she entered, and the dog climbed to all fours.

  She threw a water bladder to the man and said, “I assume you two have a plan?”

  The one called Daniel fumbled to open the bladder valve as the dog nodded.

  “Well?”

  Adar exhaled green smoke, the mist faint, tenuous. The words barely left an impression in the sand. “My power weakens. I’ll tell you more, after I rest.”

  Daniel was drinking rivers from the bladder. “Easy with that!” she said. “That has to last a full day.”

  Daniel looked befuddled. Was he a pebble-head? She looked at the odd cut of his clothes. Instead of protecting the neck from the sun, a black collar folded back down the neck for no good purpose. And black fabric in the desert? He’d quickly suffocate in the sun. Perhaps his clothes were a thief’s cut, made for slinking through the night like the Cursed Men. Whatever they were for, he couldn’t go traipsing through Azru dressed as he was, with blood on his shirt. He’d be stopped by the sentinels and hanged on suspicion of thievery.

  But Rana had prepared for this. She offered him new clothing, items she’d taken from her father’s wardrobe. Beige pants and a leather belt of camel-hide she had cut and tanned to a deep ochre. She took pleasure in dressing him, as if he were one of her creations, delighting how the clothes changed his aspect from stranger to, well, less strange. She helped him out of his bloodied shirt and into a loose-fitting white tunic, also Papa’s. The cut on Daniel’s chest looked as if an animal had clawed him, three slices just about the size of Adar’s paw. When she glanced at Adar, the demon dog blinked stolidly at her.

  The clothes fit, though poorly. Daniel was taller than Papa, but not nearly as broad. “Well, Daniel, you might pass for a trader from the north,” she said, “though your complete lack of Wul will be a problem.”

  He frowned and raised and lowered his shoulders, said something. She wasn’t sure what the gesture was supposed to mean, but it calmed her.

  “Keep your shiny shoes, Daniel. They’ll fit you better than anything I have.”

  As she was shoving his old clothes into a satchel, he grabbed her arm. He said something short, gestured into the satchel, and pulled out his black jacket. From the front breast flap, he removed the violet flower, held there with a perfectly fashioned metal pin. She’d never seen a flower or a pin quite like it.

  “From the wetlands?” she said, examining the unusual color, the delicate petals. It was deliciously mauve, like a sunset after a sandstorm. A few petals fluttered to the floor as Daniel slid the flower into his pocket.

  “Do you know any Wul at all?”

  He said something unintelligible.

  “How did you grow to be a man and not learn a single word of Wul? Even folk on the other side of the world know basic Wul. Where have you been living, Daniel?”

  He frowned.

  “Well,” she said. “It’ll be dawn soon. We should get going before the Horns of Wakefulness. Best we keep a low profile.”

  She gave Daniel three water bladders and a satchel of food. She carried the rest, as there wasn’t a satchel small enough for the dog. Then the three of them walked into the courtyard. Above, the stars were fading behind the faint morning light painting the eastern horizon, beyond the DanBaer cliffs.

  She gazed at her sleeping house. Mama, Papa, she thought. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to leave.” She led them through the stone gate onto the sleeping streets.

  They walked up Bricklayers Lane, Daniel on one side and Adar on the other. In the pre-dawn light, the city was serene, save for the occasional gust of wind stirring up sand. When they reached Dusty Square and its four stone lions, she rubbed their sharp teeth just as the Horns of Wakefulness blew from the King’s palace. Damn, was it dawn already? She had dawdled at home for too long. The blast echoed from the city walls, when a second and third set of horns joined the first. The sound ricocheted through the streets, until the whole city seemed to yawn and stretch at the sky.

  The horns faded, and the day had officially begun.

  Children kindled fires in hearths. Chimneys belched black smoke and came alive. Livestock wailed from slaughterhouses. Shop windows opened, exhaled scents of kneaded dough. The air carried the night’s chill as censers released wartseed- and spice-oil-scented smoke from the Temples of Mollai, their priests intoning prayers to the beat of the waking city.

  Rana was energized. She loved Azru, every living stone of it, the ones she had laid, and the ancient ones that predated Azru’s current incarnation by centuries. Azru was a living thing, magical, unable to be killed by war, famine, earthquake or fire.

  They reached the market quarter as the first light of day touched the DanBaer, and the mountain peaks turned as gold as molten glass. On Bedubroadstreet she waved to Emod, her old friend. The wizened hawker smoked his pipe in the shadow of his tent. He sat behind a table filled with rings, pendants, charms, belts, statuettes, and a thousand other crafts. Rana had given Emod most of these items to sell, quietly of course, since few people wer
e willing to buy creations from a girl whose insatiable creativity meant she might have a touch of demon in her. Emod, the good man that he was, passed them off as trinkets imported from foreign lands.

  Vendors were still setting up shop; few people traded so early. But Emod was ready. He’d never admit it, but she knew he slept out here, in the cold, under the stars. She never judged him for that. He was one of the few people who treated her as a person, not a cursed demon. If he accepted her for whatever she was she would do the same for him.

  “What do you have for me today, my sunshade?” Emod said, his voice roughshod from too many years sucking a pipe.

  “Sorry, Emod. I’m traveling today.”

  “And with company, I see.” Emod sized up Daniel as he sidled up beside the table to examine the items laid upon it.

  Two vendors away, Adar swiped a sundried camel flank from a man who was too busy setting up his table to notice.

  “Damn him!” Rana snapped as Adar slinked under another table to devour his meal. The dog’s theft could get them all killed.

  “Shiny shoes,” Emod said to Daniel. “Oiled ox leather, yes?”

  Daniel gazed at his shoes then at Emod, said something in his weird tongue.

  “He doesn’t speak Wul,” Rana said.

  “Plesk-ni bom-wak du-fer?” Emod said.

  “Not Ytrian either,” she said. “Nor Bedu-Besk or Demonsbreath. I don’t think he speaks any common tongue at all. What do you make of that?”

  As Daniel gazed at the items on Emod’s table, leaning into it, the table rattled. Rana had always wanted to build Emod a new one, but never got around to it.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “He found me.”

  Emod took his pipe from his mouth and pointed it at Daniel as if the man were a trinket he might consider buying. “He’s got the ghost-flesh of the north, but the shape of his eyes, the cliff of his nose, they’re unusual.”

  “Do you think . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  She leaned in and whispered, “Do you think he’s a demon?”

  Emod laughed and shook his head. “Hardly. More likely the bastard son of some wetland king who fucked his own sister.”