“You don’t think Kasim is Grace?”
“Oh, no. He definitely is. I’m just not sure he’s the one we’re supposed to be following . . .” She lets her words hang.
My gruff laugh fills the void around us. “Me, you’re thinking?”
“I don’t think you’re as bad as you think you are.”
“You don’t know the things I’ve done.” I bite my tongue. Of course she knows. She knows everything about everyone.
“I need food to survive. You need blood. We’re really no different when you think about it.”
“I told you not to mention blood.” My fangs scratch through my skull.
“Well, we can chat about rainbows and kitten farts, if you’d like, but that’s not going to get us closer to resolving your issues. So, do you enjoy killing?”
“Of course not!” I say, but that isn’t exactly true. I don’t want to talk about it, and especially not to her, but Sesay’s incessant digging has gotten us this far. Maybe she’s the one who’s had the answers I’ve been searching for all along, so I say, “I hate myself for it before. And I hate myself for it after. But in the moment, staring my prey down in the face of uncertainty—my senses open wide, and I savor every scent, every taste and texture, then the split second right before the kill, ice crashes through my veins, and it makes me feel so . . .” I can’t find the right words. Aroused, maybe. Intoxicated. Sexually charged, right there on the brink, but that makes it sound so lecherous, and it’s not like that at all.
“Connected?” Sesay offers.
“Yes! Connected to my prey. Connected to the entire world. To everything that ever was, and ever will be.” I release a long exhale, and the remnants of blood in the drainpipe go slick with ice.
Ahead of me, somewhere in the dark, Sesay slips. “Oof!”
“Sorry.”
“No, this is good. I can’t imagine how hard this has been for you. You need to process. So, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s your number?”
“Huh?”
“How many lives have you taken?”
“I don’t know. Maybe three dozen?” But of course I do know exactly. Thirty-eight. I can taste them all on my breath. Their last words echo in my skull. From the scents lingering on their skin, I could tell Sesay the story of each of them—where they lived, the sex and approximate age of their children and partners, their hobbies and vices—but I save myself the torture.
“Okay, so that amounts to two per year, averaged over the seventeen years of your life. That seems about right. For all of documented history, Icy Blue’s averaged about three to four lives per year. Some years it’s more, and then there’s a dry spell. You’re bingeing, that’s all. I suspect things will level out soon.”
“That’s all? These are people’s lives we’re talking about!”
“Well, do you know Grace’s record for killing? Seven thousand, five hundred and sixty in a single day. Including well over two thousand children. Smote the whole city of Moipone, up the coast, eighty miles north of here, or so it used to be. Distant observers reported over a thousand lightning strikes per hour. Nothing was left living, not a street dog, not an insect, not a single blade of grass.”
“Moipone, Moipone, up in flames. Lightning, thunder, who’s to blame? Count the bodies, all the same . . .” I shudder, remembering how Kasim always loved skipping rope to that rhyme. He never got to 7,560, of course, but he’d broken a hundred easily on several occasions. “I thought that was just a stupid kid’s song.”
“Nope. Three centuries of digging, and no one’s turned up any explanation as to why it happened.” Sesay’s voice goes soft. “We’re getting close. I can see light up ahead.” She stops, and the drainpipe fills with the sour sweetness of her fear, only this time the scent doesn’t cause me to salivate, but steels my nerves and stirs up the instinct to protect her.
“Maybe I should go up first, check things out . . .” I offer.
“I’m not scared, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Sesay snaps. “I’ve spent all night reconstructing the layout of the Sanctuary’s underbelly. I know what I’m doing.”
“Got it,” I say, a smile curled quietly upon my muzzle. “It’s your drainpipe. I’m just crawling through it.”
“Good,” Sesay says, then heaves a heavy sigh. “I know you know I’m lying, so go on ahead.”
Her body shivers as I slip past her as an elegant black mamba—eighteen feet of abdominal muscles moving, writhing, body covered in sleek dark scales. My forked tongue flicks into the air, bringing back smells rimmed with a metallic aftertaste, but apart from Sesay, none of those smells taste human. I peek my head through the grate. The slaughter room is long and narrow, lined with dank gray stone cobbles from floor to ceiling. On the far wall is an old wooden door, with half a dozen knives hanging on either side, kept at a meticulous shine. Along each of the long walls hang four sets of iron shackles, with matching ones below. For a brief moment, my mind twists over the reasons someone might restrain a goat or a sheep in that manner, but then the truth hits me.
“It wasn’t always animals they slaughtered here, was it?” I ask Sesay.
“They say it takes the blood of seven hundred goats to equal the potency of the life force found in a single virgin.” Sesay shoves at the grating from below, and once I have hands again, I help her from above. “Thanks,” she says, pulling herself up into the slaughter room. Her necklace has come untucked from beneath her collar. I expect to see six virtue charms upon it, but instead there is only the shadowed doubt signet. My eyes narrow, and my own doubts set in. She notices me staring, tucks it back away. “What? Does my vice offend you?” she says with a chuckle. “I’m not ashamed, but if you’d rather I take it off—”
“No, it’s fine,” I say. I see now how much her doubt fuels her virtues, driving her toward unearthing the truth. Maybe it makes her a bit of a fanatic, but we’ve all our shortcomings. My cloak begins to itch all over. I scratch like a flea-bitten dog at the base of Auben’s neck.
“You know you don’t have to wear that thing for my sake,” Sesay says with a sympathetic smile. “You look so uncomfortable.”
“It’s no trouble. I swear I don’t mind.” My skin sits loose where it should be tight, tight where it should be loose, and feels threadbare all over, like Uncle Pabio’s old smoking jacket, the one whose patches had patches, and whose red satin lining had the power to transform me into the duke of the Cape, or a superhero, or a dozen other people who I wasn’t. And here I am now, still playing pretend. Still wearing an ill-fitting jacket that isn’t my own.
“You know I know you’re lying,” Sesay says with pursed lips.
“Maybe we’re both lying a little,” I say. Sesay stiffens.
I look at her. I mean really look at her. The tells are subtle, especially on a kid her age, but there’s just something. I take a final sniff to be sure. The scents in this room aren’t nearly as tangled as they’d been in the drainpipe, and yet Sesay’s scent continues to baffle me. “Your blood . . . it’s kigen? Andy kigen.”
Her eyes widen. “I’m a girl,” she practically whimpers. Sesay shakes her head so vehemently, and looks so hurt, that my pride in outing her fizzles into guilt. I could kick myself. Instead I just sigh, and pat myself on the back for not swallowing her whole.
“I know you are. A cute, mouthy, brilliant girl.” I shrug my shoulders, letting my skin shift at the seams. Could I really let her see me? She knows what it’s like to be constantly holding a shield out to the world. That shield protects us from the cruelty out there, but it can also deflect kindness and deeper connections. Maybe if I throw down my shield, she’ll follow suit. “You really don’t mind if I slip into something more comfortable? I mean, it’s just skin, right? It’s what’s on the inside that matters.”
“I’m pretty sure what’s on your inside has wanted to kill me at least twenty times today,” Sesay says with a precocious grin. “But yeah, go ahead. Do what feels right.”
So I relax, relea
se. I let loose all the tension and energy spent holding this form, but I do not shift into another. My bones simply settle. They become what I am. I’ve been hiding from my true self for so long that I do not know what that is, but from the fear on Sesay’s face, and the thorny scales upon my arms, I know that it is not Auben Mtuze.
My hooves clack on the cobbles as I walk toward the door, knees bending the wrong direction, the sharp tips of heavy, taloned wings gouging ashy trails through centuries-old stone. I pull a gleaming cleaver down from the wall, and stare balefully at my reflection. “I’m hideous.”
“Yeah,” Sesay says with a quaver in her voice, not bothering to lie this time. “But it could be worse. You could have this.” She tips up on her toes, and looks at her own reflection, rubbing at the ink on her forehead. She groans again, then heaves open the door. “Come on. Gueye Okahim will be meditating and tending the flames at the Overchamber in the hours prior to the big announcement. I’m certain we’ll find him there.”
Something warm and unfamiliar buds in my heart. It only takes a few seconds for the ice to overwhelm it, but it was there. Humility. Or at least as close to it as I’m going to get. I bolt after Sesay, like her eager lap dog. “Hey, Sesay. Your tattoo . . . maybe it’s not the I in Kasim. Maybe it’s the I for Icy Blue.”
Sesay spins around, eyes as wide and bright as they were that first time we’d met. “Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”
I don a cloak, an actual one this time, the same dark robes worn by the dozens of Men of Virtue bustling about the place. There is a hurried madness all about, and one new and mysteriously robed visitor with a mysteriously low-hanging hood, walking with a mysteriously awkward gimp is hardly noticed, much less questioned. Still, we stick to the shadows, to the back hallways, slowly making our way up one flight of stone stairs after another.
When the hallway is clear, I stop. The slit in my robe parts open enough for Sesay to look out and get her bearings. “Up another fifty feet, make a left at the horny zekwenusi.”
The place is lousy with zekwenusi, their fangs bared, creeping all around us like apparitions set in stone. Their chimeral combinations vary in infinite ways—zebra-falcon-rhino, lion-crow-ram, cobra-oryx-vulture. They all have hooves, wings, and horns of some sort or another, but none of them do justice to the horrid mix of flesh that dwells beneath these robes. Sesay’s hands grip around my furred leg, ready to continue our slothful journey. I’m about to ask her which of the horned statues, but then I see the lecherous monstrosity ahead of us—a lion’s head cocked back in a mighty roar set upon a finely striped zebra’s torso sporting a thick, thorny dick jutting out into the hallway—impressively erotic, even though the head has been lopped off. Whether this was done out of a sense of decency or simply to remove a trip hazard, I cannot say. I veer toward it, but then I catch the scent of three men approaching. I tuck my head deeper into my hood, and stick as close to the wall as possible.
“Orefe rin peileu wan,” the Men of Virtue say as they near me.
“Orefe rin peileu wan,” I repeat, exactly as Sesay had instructed me to.
Their steps slow. I said it right, I know it. Then I see it. My robe has snagged on the jagged edges of the zekwenusi’s erection. Sesay is fully exposed.
“Um . . . Orefe rin peileu wan?” she says, giving them a full dose of her big brown eyes.
Underneath my robe, my claws turn to daggers. Three. It’s just three more lives to add to my tally. That’ll make forty-one altogether. It’ll be easy, quick, painless. Well, easy and quick anyway, but I can’t do it, not in front of Sesay. I know it’s stupid, but I don’t want to take that innocence away from her. I don’t want her to look at me the way Ruda did.
“What is the meaning of this?” asks one of the men. He tugs Sesay by the scruff of her shirt, then pulls back my hood. He gasps, his eyes dart down. “I—I’m so sorry,” he says, trembling. “I didn’t know it was you, Inegberunako.”
I stare back at him with Kasim’s frown upon my face. Wearing Kasim’s skin makes Auben’s seem like a perfectly tailored cashmere ciki in comparison. Each second I wear it makes me want to tear the flesh from my own limbs, so I hastily pick Sesay up, and pull her in tight. Everyone has vices, and I’ve come all too close to knowing Kasim’s. “You have an issue with my taking a turn of dalliance?”
The three men exchange hushed words and worried glances.
“No, Inegberunako!” Hints of a lecherous grin hit the corners of the man’s mouth, but he swallows it back. “But there are private passages for that. If you were caught up here, so close to the Overchamber . . .”
“Noted,” I say, and push Sesay around the corner. The instant we’re out of view, my bones settle. I wish I could say the same for my nerves.
“They’ve given Kasim a title . . .” Sesay says, walking with more purpose. “Students taken into confidence don’t get titles. And even Men of Virtue don’t get titles like that.”
“Like what?”
“Light of a Thousand Seasons is the literal translation, but a more practical one would be Eternal Light.” Sesay stops in front of an ornately carved wooden door. “And where there is light, there must be shadow.”
Eternal Light my ass. I know dark things my brother is capable of. But I can’t let those thoughts consume me, not when I’m so close to Gueye Okahim.
“I’m going in alone,” I tell Sesay. I nod at the dark recess behind the tangle of raised hooves on a pair of fighting zekwenusi. “Stay here, out of sight. I won’t be long.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Talk to him.” It’s not exactly a lie. I will talk to him . . . at first. My claws glide through the seal of the door like a letter opener through the lip of an envelope. Seven locks slice in half, and I press the door open quietly and step into the domed room. The sharp, medicinal smell of fine bush burning in the room’s central smokestack overwhelms me. I blot away the tears in my eyes, and see Gueye Okahim sitting cross-legged, next to the smoking stack. Candles burn on mirrored plates, and short stacks of ancient books line the parameter all around.
“Please, join me, my lord,” Gueye Okahim whispers, and yet his voice consumes the space, filling me with a quiet unease. He holds something in his lap, strokes it, strokes it.
“I’m not your lord,” I say, throat full of gravel.
“Oh, aren’t you?” Gueye Okahim stands, goes to the far edge of the room, and stares through a giant pane of stained glass, just clear enough to reveal the silhouettes of the thousands of parishioners gathering below to hear his lies. “Their minds are simple. They forget that they are yours, too, Auben. That you are their lord as much as Kasim. They worship the purity of virtue, and forget the lessons of vice.” He turns and looks my true form over, as if taking in the visage of a childhood friend.
Cradled in his arms, he holds the tip of the zekwenusi’s stone penis. He strokes it absentmindedly, like a pet lulled into sleep. My mind reels. What kind of perverse fetishes have these walls witnessed?
“Tell me, Amawusiakaraseiya, what vices have you forgotten? Duplicity, I’m guessing. I know you were in Gabadamosi’s Theatrics Club.” I look deeply into his eyes. They twinge ever so slightly with the jealousy of a man who’s spent half his life pretending to be a god, finally looking back at the real thing. “Envy as well?”
“I set aside my vices when I went through Transcendence.” Gueye Okahim dishes me a helping of humility, but I refuse to be swayed.
“You’re a magnificent actor, I’ll give you that. More craft than you could have learned from a preparatory school. Where’d you study? And how many of your fellow thespians died in the cover-up?”
Gueye Okahim stares me down, doesn’t even flinch. “Wars are still being fought in Grace’s name. Blood is still being shed. Only the weapons have changed.”
“You’re not lying about that.” I pounce upon him and set a claw at his throat. The penis hits the floor tiles with a thud.
“Do it, and you’ll only se
nd them further into Grace’s arms. It doesn’t matter how I got here. I’m a believer now. My blood will be a testament of that.” Behind Gueye Okahim’s wide and bright smile, I suddenly feel the weight of his duplicitous tongue. My skin prickles as my eyes dart to the mirrors sitting beneath the candles, over to the smokestack and the wheezing cauldron filled with madly burning fine bush, back to the stone phallus. Mirrors for vainglory. Steam for temper. A penis for lechery.
I look at Gueye Okahim, overcome with the feeling that he is the cheese. The bait. And I am not the hunter, but the hunted. I scan the room for other talismans I’ve overlooked, then from the doorway, I hear the ringing of small bells, no—the jingling of coins in a pocket.
“Greed,” I exhale. It is so easy to forget about Kasim’s lone vice. A vice that has gone unchecked since I’ve been away. Here I was, thinking that my brother had already taken everything he could from me, but I have one thing left that he covets.
My charity.
Kasim steps into the room, dangling Sesay by the scruff. His own feet don’t quite make it all the way down to the floor. “Yes, greed. It pollutes me.”
I pull Gueye Okahim closer, holding him between my brother and me as a human shield. “Let her go, or I swear I’ll spill his blood.”
Kasim laughs. He hovers, a sliver of the brother I knew. Gaunt and sickly, save for his bright smile. He steps closer. His arm raises slowly, hand locked like an open claw. He gives his wrist a sudden and violent twist, and Gueye Okahim’s body goes stiff in my grip, his head swiveling in my direction with an awful crack. The light behind his eyes vanishes. “For all the tastes of pure delight.” His mouth flaps like a dummy’s. “My dear, sweet Delilah, I bid you good-night.”
I let go. Gueye Okahim stands there, an empty husk, then crumples into a pile on the floor. Sesay screams. My blood rushes warm all over. The urge to protect her drills its way into my bones, but I do my best to ignore it.
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