by Jill Braden
“He looks good.”
“Looks seem to be their only criteria for picking the actors. But it was nice to see some of our old troupe.”
The first time QuiTai had watched, the familiar faces nearly made her cry. How could they be so little changed when she felt as if decades had passed? “I’m glad you liked it,” she said. “I bought every story they have, and I hear that they’re making more every day. Fashion isn’t the only thing changing in Rantuum.” She showed Jezereet the stack of cartridges in the bottom of the box.
Jezereet hugged QuiTai. “You spoil me.”
“It brings me pleasure to see you smile. Would you like to watch another?”
Shaking her head, Jezereet set the contraption back into the box. Her eyes were weary. “I’m sorry. I seem to be fading quickly today.” She rubbed her arms. “You have an umbrella. Is it monsoon already?”
“It has been for weeks. Don’t you hear the rain? It’s cleansing the air. Would you like to open your window and smell how fresh it is?”
Jezereet gripped her wrist. “No, no, no.” She shook her head. “I can’t bear it. The breeze makes my skin itch.”
“All right. We’ll leave it closed.”
“I wish monsoon would come. How can you people stand this heat?”
QuiTai bit her lip. She hated the circular discussions, but it was useless to correct Jezereet. “We dress for it. If you’d only learn to wear a sarong… Turn around and I’ll loosen your laces.”
Jezereet stood and let her overclothes slip to the floor. She removed the wire frames that supported her skirts. “Freed from the burden of civilization.” Her delicious curves had turned to bones. The once-famous luster of her skin was gray.
“Your camisole is damp. Shall I wash your neck? It would cool you down.” QuiTai pressed her lips to Jezereet’s pale shoulder.
Jezereet turned with a grin. She placed a quick peck on QuiTai’s lips then lingered on her second kiss. “Let’s take the vapor.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Just a little bowl.” Jezereet’s kisses lingered longer. “I’ll shift male if you’d like.”
QuiTai’s mouth bowed in a frown. No, she did not want Jezereet to waste precious energy on a shift. “I have business to attend to.”
Jezereet’s eyes grew cold as she dropped onto the divan. “Always.” She shoved the kinescope away as if she couldn’t bear the sight of it. The cartridges spilled to the floor. “Toys, but never your time. I know you take the vapor with Petrof. Sometimes I can smell it on you.”
“I bring you what I can scrape out of his pipe after he’s in vapor dream. Jezereet, the dealers are too afraid of him to sell to me. If I could, you know I’d give it to you right now.”
“Liar!” Jezereet’s fingernails dug into QuiTai’s slim forearm.
“You’re hurting me, love.”
The pain of the nails was only part of the ache. Jezereet used to be such fun, but the black lotus had stripped away her spark and left only ugly need. It was getting harder to pretend she was who she used to be. Guilt made QuiTai try, but even that had its limit.
“It’s like bugs crawling under my skin. I can’t scrape them out. I’ve tried.” She showed QuiTai the open sore on her thigh.
“I promise I’ll bring you some next time.”
Jezereet’s eyes were full of cunning hope. “Tonight?”
“Next time,” QuiTai said patiently.
“I hate you.” Jezereet’s grip tightened. QuiTai gently, but firmly, pushed her back onto the bed. Jezereet gasped when she saw blood trickle down QuiTai’s arm. “I didn’t mean it! You know I didn’t.”
“I know.” QuiTai eased onto the mattress and cradled Jezereet’s head to her bosom. She smoothed Jezereet’s hair as she rocked her. “I know.”
Chapter 3: A Proposition
QuiTai stood back as Ivitch pounded on the door for the fifth time. “What?” she heard Kyam bellow from inside, and then the door flew open.
Kyam stopped short when he saw Ivitch’s fist before his nose.
QuiTai could see he was trying to appear as if he’d just woken, although he’d shaved. His long black bangs fell into his eyes, but his hair gleamed as if recently washed and brushed. While he usually left the top buttons of his shewani jacket open and the sleeves pushed back, today he’d buttoned all the way to his neck and left the sleeves down. He wanted to make a good impression. Of course, his grumpy demeanor ruined that. QuiTai wondered if he’d known Ivitch was with her before he opened the door.
For her first sitting, she’d chosen a simple kebaya blouse and batik sarong in the style of the QuiYalin Provence. Her black braid wound over her shoulder and dropped to her waist. If she had to have her portrait painted, she’d be damned if she’d dress like a Thampurian.
“You were expecting us, weren’t you, Mister Zul?” She strolled past him into his fourth floor apartment.
Stacks of canvases leaned against the mold-mottled walls. The mosquito netting over his crisply made bed had been mended in several places. A wardrobe, two rickety chairs, and a small desk were pushed aside to make room for an easel and a table splattered with bright globs of paint. A drop cloth was thrown over the floor, but yellow flecks speckled the bare wood around it.
Kyam turned his attention to Ivitch. The men were about the same height, both with muscular builds, but there was no real resemblance between them: Ivitch looked as if he belonged behind a plow, where Kyam had an easy grace as if comfortable no matter his surroundings.
“What’s with the bodyguard?” Kyam stifled a yawn as he stretched.
She lifted a filthy cloth from the back of a chair, wrinkled her nose, and let the cloth drop to the floor. “That’s Ivitch. He loathes me.”
“Who doesn’t?” Kyam slammed the door shut.
He had a habit of standing too close so that he could glower down at her. If he thought that intimidated her, he was wrong – it brought out her fighting instinct. She folded her arms across her chest. “This studio isn’t fit for a beast, even a Thampurian.”
“If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have forced me to live here.”
Ivitch’s suspicious eyes slid from QuiTai to Kyam. “What’s he talking about?”
“Nothing of importance,” she told Ivitch. “Really, Mister Zul, It’s been a year. You could have moved.”
“Does the Devil know?” Ivitch asked. He seemed eager for tales to tattle.
With mischief dancing merrily across his face, Kyam looked down at QuiTai. “Yes. Does he?”
He was the most infuriating man. “You boys have bonded already. How nice.”
“The enemy of my enemy...” Kyam said. Ivitch nodded.
She dusted the seat of one of the chairs before settling onto it. “I thought only Ponongese traded stories at gatherings, Mister Zul. You’ve gone native.”
That remark wiped the humor from Kyam’s face. She noted how stricken he seemed in the instant before he returned to his usual surliness.
“Do you remember when Mister Zul arrived in Levapur, Ivitch? He was attacked by ruffians –”
“That you sent,” Kyam said.
“Am I telling this, or are you?”
Kyam made a gesture for her to continue. She lifted her chin and turned away from him.
“He was attacked by ruffians beyond the marketplace. It seems that he was mesmerized by the sight of a young lady on the veranda of the Red Happiness.”
“Who was told to distract me.”
“For a jaded debauch from the continent, you were easily distracted.”
“The young lady in question hiked up her petticoats. She wasn’t wearing any – Well, she made her profession clear,” Kyam told Ivitch. “Like Madame Jezereet, she was an Ingosolian.”
Whatever Kyam was after, he wasn’t going to get it by trying to make Ivitch his chum. The idea of the two men chatting about women was laughable. Kyam’s clothes might have been studiously shabby, but they were quality. Social-climbing Thampurians tr
ied to mimic his pedigreed accent. There was no doubt that he was a gentleman despite his reduced circumstances and gruff manners; whereas Ivitch was a thug.
Ivitch proved it by shoving the mosquito netting aside and reclining on Kyam’s bed without taking off his boots. Kyam and QuiTai exchanged horrified glances.
“Ingosolians. The ultimate shifters,” Kyam said in a distracted tone. He seemed unable to turn away from the shocking sight of a werewolf sprawled across his bed. Then he cleared his throat. “So there I was, admiring the show, when two scruffy men attacked me from behind. They knocked me to the ground and were kicking the sh…” – Kyam glanced at QuiTai – “the daylights out of me, when off in the distance, this woman appears … ”
“He means me. Don’t get huffy, Mister Zul. You interrupted me too. But go on. Tell your story.”
“From her eyes, clearly a native of Ponong, but dressed as if she’d stepped out of my mother’s salon back in Thampur. As she came closer, the men grabbed my trunk and ran off. So there I am, bleeding on the street, and she walks to me.”
“I did not walk to you. You were in the middle of the street and I saw no reason to detour around you.”
“And I said, ‘Help, I’ve been attacked! Call for the police,’ and she said, ‘Police, Mister Zul? You are a fresh,’ then steps right over me as if I’m not even there.”
“Can you imagine? He expected me to help,” QuiTai said to Ivitch.
“Now I know better, don’t I? I’d heard that this island was lawless. I expected some crime. But a man attacked in the middle of the street in front of thirty witnesses, and no one does anything?”
Kyam’s outrage sparked QuiTai’s anger. He acted as if he didn’t know why Levapur was the way it was. “You can thank your government for that, sea dragon.”
“Or your master – the Devil.”
They were on the brink of one of their vicious arguments. If Kyam didn’t have the sense to tone it down, she’d have to be the one who brought them back to the point of this meeting. With some difficulty, she set aside her simmering outrage.
“You forget it was the Devil who made sure that you were reunited with your belongings. Although...” QuiTai wrinkled her nose at an orange and yellow painting leaning against the wall near her. “The rest of the world might not thank me for giving you back your paints and brushes. Couldn’t you be a poet instead?”
But Kyam refused to be deterred. “So I finally dragged myself to the bank for the first advance on my remittance, and went in search of a place to stay; only everyone in town refused to house me.” He shot QuiTai a jaundiced look, and then went on, “Until I came to this, this...” Kyam lifted his hands to the water-stained ceiling of his apartment.
“Dump,” QuiTai said.
Kyam shook his finger at her. “And how do I know she was behind it? Because when my landlady unlocked the door for me, which she refused to do until I gave her a month’s rent, there was QuiTai sitting here on my trunk!”
“It was too heavy to move on my own, so why not bring him to his trunk rather than the other way around?” she asked Ivitch.
Ivitch didn’t so much as crack a smile. The werewolves never could acclimate to Ponong, either the weather or the culture.
Kyam snatched a pad of paper from his desk and shoved pencils into the breast pocket of his shewani jacket. His temper seemed ready to explode. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
That, QuiTai could agree with.
Kyam stalked to the door.
Ivitch reluctantly rose from the bed. He scratched behind his ear. “Where are we going?”
“I need better light,” Kyam said. He headed out of his apartment.
Ivitch gave QuiTai an annoyed but puzzled glance. Equally confused, she shrugged.
~ ~ ~
The funicular line from the town to the harbor below had been built to move cargo, but passengers were grudgingly allowed to ride rather than brave the steep path that crisscrossed the track a dozen times. There were no seats. The interior was scarred from crates that had broken free from the cargo belts that strained to hold them in place.
“Stinks in here. They shouldn’t allow the fishermen to bring their catch up in these,” Ivitch said.
Kyam took a pencil from his pocket and whittled the end with a pocket knife.
QuiTai peered out the hazy window that she wished someone would clean. Overhead, thick green leaves longer than her arm created a shaded tunnel. Halfway down, the dense plants suddenly dropped away, revealing the turquoise waters of the harbor, and beyond, the sapphire Sea of Erykoli. Monolith stones far from shore, bleached white from the sun and covered in thick layers of bird guano, jutted from the harbor’s water like the sails of ghost ships dredged up from watery graves. Most were bare, but tenacious wind-bowed trees clung to the tops of the biggest stones. On the eastern side of the island, similar rocks formed the dreaded Ponong Fangs.
From this far above the harbor, the round stone fortress squatting on the end of a jetty looked like a crenellated ring with an emerald center. The wharf was a narrow band of commerce on the western edge, near where three- and four-masted junks anchored. Between the wharf and the lower funicular station was a slim crescent of red sand beach that ended abruptly at a cliff.
The funicular creaked slowly down the track. Another thicket of trees blocked her view for several minutes. When they emerged into sun again, it seemed ten degrees hotter inside the stuffy car. The narrow side window screeched in protest as she lowered it to let in the sea breeze.
The funicular bumped to a stop.
Ivitch listed and tried to catch his balance in three quick steps before stumbling into the wall of the car. “There was plenty of sunlight in town, Zul,” he snapped as he rubbed his shoulder.
“Not like here. It bounces off the water –”
“Light doesn’t bounce,” Ivitch said with the absolutely certainty of a man who is often wrong but doesn’t know it.
Kyam turned to QuiTai. “Well? I suppose you have some complaint too.”
She shook her head. If he’d swathed her in velvet and taken her to an inland valley cut off from the ocean breezes, she wouldn’t have complained. She was all curiosity now. It was right there, almost within touch, what he wanted from her. As much as she enjoyed speculating, it was time to find out.
Dock workers lounged along the wharf: Between ships arriving or setting sail, there were many long hours with nothing for them to do. One group squatted at the far end and pitched coins against a wall; Ivitch’s eyes lit up, until Kyam led them down the narrow beach. The shouts of the players carried over the noise of the wind and waves. Ivitch kept looking back.
“Lady QuiTai, stand there, looking out at the sea.” Kyam pointed to a spot in the sand then perched on a small monolith stone several feet away. He flipped open his sketch pad.
“What am I supposed to do?” Ivitch asked.
“Spy on me,” QuiTai said.
“Could you turn? No. Here, let me show you.” Kyam stepped over, gripped QuiTai’s shoulders, and adjusted her position slightly. “Then turn your head to face me. Good.” He returned to the boulder, selected a pencil from his pocket, and began to sketch.
QuiTai had no idea how Kyam wanted her to pose, so she simply stood and looked past him. Across the harbor, red flags emblazoned with the Thampurian Imperial chop snapped above the fortress. Near the wharf, junks at anchor rolled with the incoming waves: The closest to the fortress flew banners with the symbols of Thampur and three of the thirteen families. She assumed that meant the ship was a joint venture. In contrast, the junk anchored further from the wharf, with the single eye painted on its hull, flew only the Thampurian flag and banners with the chop of the Zul clan. Kyam’s family owned their own fleet.
She wondered which son Kyam was; had he always known those ships would never be his, or were the banners were a constant reminder of what he’d lost? But he wasn’t a real remittance man, she reminded herself: Any day he chose, he could stop playing spy,
show his articles of transport to the harbor master, and board a ship bound for Thampur. Except that he wouldn’t. No matter how miserable QuiTai tried to make his life, he stayed.
She should know by now that it was useless to try. The Oracle had told her long ago that Kyam Zul would become the colonial governor of Ponong. And the Oracle was never wrong.
Ivitch paced behind Kyam, stopping occasionally to peer over Kyam’s shoulder.
“Could you stop doing that? You’re distracting me. Can’t you watch her from over there somewhere?” He motioned toward the wharf.
Ivitch licked his lips.
“No, he couldn’t,” QuiTai said.
Ivitch sneered at her and headed down the beach.
“That was too easy,” Kyam said as they watched Ivitch join the gamblers at the end of the wharf.
She jutted her chin toward the wharf. “Yours?”
“It’s happy coincidence that the dockworkers are here but didn’t have cargo to unload. I didn’t expect him, after all. I go to all this trouble to set up a private talk, and you bring a chaperone.”
“You went to trouble?” She had to control her outrage. Unless it would give her leverage, she’d never tell Kyam what she’d done to meet him at the Red Happiness. “The Devil is jealous and paranoid. If I’d tried to convince him not to send one of his men, he would have insisted, so I suggested it first.”
Kyam sniffed and bent over his drawing pad. “Don’t move if you can help it.”
She focused over his shoulder. “Did you really gamble away your remittance just so that you’d have an excuse to accept the commission for the portrait? That was thorough of you.”
Kyam scowled. “It wasn’t as easy as you think. I kept winning.”
She put her hand over her mouth as she laughed. “You should have sent word. I could have arranged to have you robbed right outside the Dragon Pearl, in front of witnesses.”
“Once was enough, thank you.”
She took a deep breath as she looked out at the sea beyond the harbor seawall. The salted air felt cleansing as she drew it into her lungs.
