She pulled her hands from her coat, trying to act less conspicuous. “Ya think?” she hissed. “Ya just told me we’re in a town of folks who’d have us gutted for not being one of ‘em, and they’d do it for a pat on the back.”
Flynn replied as though he hadn’t even noticed what she’d said. “You could’ve stayed at the house.”
He didn’t get it. Couldn’t. And she didn’t get how he couldn’t. Even when someone could “pass,” there was always another eager to rat them out. Jean had been mulling over yesterday’s girl, the one they’d stuck for the crowd. People probably felt better that she was gone, but all Jean could think was how long she must’ve been hiding in plain sight, trying to pass for normal. She rubbed her enlarged forearms subconsciously, wondering what had given the girl away.
“Could’ve,” she responded to Flynn’s suggestion. “Couldn’t leave ya to yerself … ‘sides, I get stir crazy if I’m indoors too long.”
Flynn’s smile was brief, but she felt better to be welcome in his company. Still, Jean wasn’t about to kiss anyone’s feet, goddess or otherwise, to keep her place. She didn’t want to give it up, and a mixture of sentiments churned within her. Bad as things were, leaving now seemed hasty—stupid, even, after they’d come so far to get here. She’d never even gotten to go beyond the city walls, and wondered if the world outside was as lush as the one within.
“Look, I’ve been cognatin’,” Jean began. “What about the other burgs? We could just hop a wagon and ditch this crazy town.”
“We could,” Flynn replied, his gaze focused on the path ahead. “Elthan is just east of here. Diamas is another coastal city to the southeast and there’s another still called Teague that’s bigger than Cordom, and much farther south.”
“See, maybe we’re just rushin’ a bit to find a way outta here?”
“There’s also a Saryu cathedral in every one of them,” Flynn went on. “We’d be facing the same problems in any of those places that we will here. It’s just the faces that’ll change.”
Jean’s heart sank a little. There was enough to like about TseTsu that she’d really wanted to make things work. In part, it was for Mack, who never had much trouble falling into place, but seemed happy here just the same. Even without Mack, part of her wanted to stay, and the conflict churned inside her.
“I don’t really wanna run anymore,” she confided to Flynn.
“I don’t either,” he replied. “I’m not used to it.”
“I am. I’ve been runnin’ longer than I can remember. I had chances to stay. More than a few. Never could hash it.” She looked around. “I don’t feel safe for much. Not here. Not really.”
“You’ve had to run all your life,” he observed.
He should know. He should understand. “Yeah? So why didn’t you?”
“I was dealt the better hand,” Flynn said. “I knew how to deflect attention, and how to keep people from getting what they wanted until they gave me what I’d earned.”
“So why don’t ya just do all that again here?” she asked.
“I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
Jean scrunched her mouth in annoyance, mostly with herself—despite knowing the kinds of things Flynn used to do, she was the one who felt like a heel—and didn’t say anything more. The noise around them swelled as they moved through the marketplace, and subsided only a little when they emerged at base of the hill leading up to the stone manor.
“That the place?” Jean asked. Flynn had filled her in on that too.
“That’s it,” he confirmed. “I’m not sure yet how we’re going to get inside, short of storming the gates and getting stabbed. A lot.”
It wouldn’t be hard, Jean thought, at least not for her. But like Flynn, she didn’t want to be what she once was either, although she did take a little pleasure in knowing what she could do even if she wouldn’t.
Flynn beckoned her to follow him to a nearby bench. She did so uncertainly, joining him in sitting upon it as he produced two small volumes—clearly swiped from Chari’s stacks—and handed one to her.
“I can’t read this,” she admitted.
“Neither can I,” he said, opening the book and doing something that looked an awful lot like reading.
Before they’d stepped out, Flynn had told Jean she would have to follow his lead if she came with; reluctantly, she did. Although the words didn’t evoke the sort of searing pain she’d suffered on Sechal (which had reestablished her belief that no good came from reading), TseTsuan writing may as well have. She could read a little back home, sure, but hadn’t had the luxury of progressing beyond most of the alphabet and the small words you could spell with them.
She spent a while trying to surmise what the TseTsuan analogue to the letter A was, since it was an important letter in spelling her own name and, in the off chance that they ended up staying, it was something she felt she should know how to write. She eventually began to doubt that these people even had a letter A, despite having heard Chari use words containing it. She glanced at Flynn, who was seemingly engrossed, focused on his book and flipping from page to page. Unwilling to break the silence he’d put up between them, she tried to go back to the text in her hand, but found that the symbols had not magically taken on any new meaning. Leaning back, she craned her head toward the sky. The sun glared down and sweat beaded from her forehead. Fuck, it’s hot.
Slipping off her jacket, Jean set it between herself and Flynn. Dropping the open book on her head, she decided to get some shut-eye while looking as productive as possible. Her consciousness faded for a time, and she daydreamed of old times with Mack, back in the sprawling city of Marghelzet, eating stolen chicken and drinking stolen water.
*
“I think that’s all we’ll get here.”
Jean startled, snorted, and the book slid off her face and fell toward the ground. Flynn caught it by the cover just before it connected, flipping it shut in one deft motion.
“So wait, what’d we get?” Jean rubbed her eyes, the glare of the sunlight returning in full force. She wanted to hit him and snatch the sunglasses from his face.
“Siehron Manor,” he told her, glancing up the hill. “There’s a baron who lives there, but the church has other investments in the place. Something to do with the heathens.”
“You got all that from a book you can’t read?”
“No,” he replied with a hint of smugness. “I listened to the people passing by.”
Flynn beckoned for Jean to follow. Rising, she slung her jacket over her shoulder and kept pace with interest. They went left from the hillside path, roughly north along a side passage that wrapped around the marketplace and behind a dozen timber homes.
“Normally, I’d go find the right person or place to do research, preparation,” Flynn explained. “When you can’t talk to people or don’t know who or what you’re looking for, sometimes just closing your eyes, filtering out the noise and listening will get you what you need.”
“But the recon is still boring as fuck.”
Jean was privately impressed, and at first she tried to do as he did, but she could find no conversation to hold onto long enough before it passed her by. Failing at that, she attempted to study people’s faces, but found a river of disquieting glances that left her feeling self-conscious. She focused instead on Flynn’s backside, which was not interesting in the least but didn’t judge either.
They came out in a square with a wooden platform off-center toward the east. There were two other paths besides the one from which they’d entered—one to the west, and another smaller one just beyond the platform. Children ran around at play but upon noticing the two strangers, quieted down and veered away.
“We’re scary,” Jean chuckled with a sort of pride. Fear sometimes kept people from bugging you.
“That we are,” Flynn agreed, leading her to the wooden platform and placing his hand upon it. He closed his eyes and sank into thought. Children’s footsteps swelled and faded behind them, along with their lau
ghter and heroic cries of fantasy and adventure. Jean moved to Flynn’s side and stood on her toes, looking across the platform. There was a discoloration in the wood, pooled wide in one spot. It wasn’t fresh, but she knew blood when she saw it.
“It happened here, didn’t it?” And they let kids play here. It was a chilling thought.
With a nod, Flynn moved around the platform. He began to climb the stepladder on the backside, then paused long enough to spy someone noticing him and, opting against the attention, returned to ground level. He paid mind now to the smaller path beyond, which was more hill and stone and uncertain earth than any established route they’d seen in this city.
“Leads up to the house on the hill, I’m bettin’.”
“I had the same thought.” Flynn looked back at the platform for a moment. “The Inquisitor does her work here. When her victim is finally broken, they’re brought down through this path to a public end.”
Jean had seen a hundred kills or more in the streets she’d walked and slept in alike, from knifings to bashings to the uglier things half-humans like her could do. But public executions were something Jean hadn’t seen, and it seemed as impersonal as it did inhumane.
“That’s our way in, ain’t it?” she asked, finding a sick understanding for what Flynn had in mind.
“It seems the best: Get the Inquisitor’s attention. Let them grab us, take us right inside.” He looked at Jean confidently. “Once we’re in, you can break us right back out.”
Wasn’t much that didn’t make sense, when phrased the right way. Flynn’s plan certainly did—and, yes, she probably could bust them out without breaking a sweat once they were inside. But Jean had met those who’d argued that half-humans should be locked away—“quarantine,” they’d called it. More than a few jaws were cracked in response. Jean didn’t suffer bullshit that involved putting her freedom on the line.
“Won’t do it. Not to Mack. Not to me.” She shook her head. “Freedom’s too important to risk like that.”
“Then unless I can find another way away from here, the most freedom we’ll ever know is what the culture of TseTsu gives us.” If Flynn was disappointed, he masked it too well.
There was ugliness no matter where Jean looked. Dissatisfied, she took the lead this time and Flynn followed her. She just wanted to get home, such as it was, and sleep on it. The afternoon sun was sinking and maybe she would feel better about Flynn’s stupid plan in the morning.
*
On an end table in Chari’s bedroom, the tiffany garments that normally clothed her were instead neatly laid atop one another, while the priestess’s slender body itself reclined in the bed. Her toes played lazily with one of her strings of prayer beads, which had been left half-looped around a bedpost.
The boy was gone, sent away after she’d gotten what she needed from him. The proper precautions were taken during the act—and there was assuredly a bit of acting mixed in. She didn’t need any reason to see him again and wasn’t inclined to give the church another disciple just yet.
A cocktail of sweat and fluid soaked the sheets, and though it was a warm spring day, there was a coolness under her thick blanket. The window didn’t let so much light in as Chari wanted, so she struck a match and lit a lantern hanging by her bed. She sat up, taking a book in her lap: Bizarre Horrors of the Southern Isles. The accounts of Raddius Tehmbao opened with the grim recollection of the deaths of his wife and child to sickness, and his reasons for volunteering to go to a place where “none may return.” Obviously a load of claptrap, Chari thought, as he very well did return, and published a book about it to boot.
The early chapters focused on the journey rather than the destination: entering into unfamiliar waters and the sort of aberrant creatures they had to catch and eat, including cretins with a coat of limp fibers whose every strand concealed a poisoned needle, potent enough to kill a man whose bare hands might brush against them. The wood engraving on the next page, showing the scene Raddius described, was a hyperbolic image of a crewman convulsing from the poisoning as the kethelfish flopped menacingly on the deck. Its fangs were well exaggerated and it was twice as big as any she’d ever seen or eaten.
She flipped ahead, skimming until their arrival on one of the smaller isles. Chari was disappointed by accounts of lizard creatures easily twice the size of a man’s body, as she’d been hoping for dragons and was ever sorry to find none. Two isles later, she finally came across the account she was looking for:
Each isle we came upon, it should be apparent, was more deadly than the last. The ensickening mosquitoes of Tay-Tay drove us back to the sea and sent more than half our crew below deck.
The captain was ready to call the venture a failure and return home, but we had neither the manpower nor the resources at this stage. Left with no other choice, we came upon the greater of the southern isles, Calsuu.
We had skirted around Calsuu for some days under the auspices of saving the greatest for last, but I think it was a softer fear that kept us at bay, crippled as we were by the horrors encountered along the sea and upon lesser lands.
I still tremble when I remember Colvo, eaten alive. Whole. The sound of his screams as the beast that devoured him escaped, his voice muted by a wall of flesh and fading. I did not wish such a fate for any of my fellows, and bravely vowed to take point upon landing.
Chari flipped ahead a few pages, as she had little interest in the exotic flora, which Raddius described in a hundred different ways as being “bigger” than the stuff back on Movonia.
It was from the safety of dwarfing foliage I first saw them—they who were men, yet not. They were shaggy things—brutish, a touch larger than any giant of a man I’d ever met or seen. Their teeth were parody, large and flat.
I saw madness in their eyes and prayed to Hapané that they would not turn and find me. To be reflected in those wreaths of flame and hate would have promised my remains unknowable, whatever parts of me torn away and scattered through the lands.
She sneered at the melodrama, but stopped as she saw the wood engraving soon after that reflected the creature Raddius described. The beastmen were many things, but they were very little like Flynn. Even ignoring Raddius’s propensity for exaggeration, she saw images of men with ears that were large and round, creatures whose eyes were not slitten and indeed had a touch of the madness that the explorer had feared. Whatever artistic liberties had been taken, they were too far removed to be the same thing as the man she’d met two days prior.
“What have I invited in?” Chari trembled softly.
It had grown dark in the last few hours, and the shadows were reaching her despite the lamp flame’s desperate vie to keep them at bay. She closed the book and rested it in her lap. I’ve closeted my fears. She had told him that and more, yet had shared so little still. It would be enough, just the same, for the Inquisitor to take her. Break her. The only gratitude Chari felt in her heart at times like this when fear was ripest was that her mother was dead; her torturer would at least be an impersonal body.
A sickness within her belly turned, and she began to sweat.
It was possible that whatever hints she had whispered to Flynn would remain between them, that he and his friends would take what they knew—what he knew, most of all—and be on their way.
But they would be out there still. He would know that the High Priestess doubted the intentions of the church and the wisdom of the sacred Goddess. What she had dared breathe to someone so foreign, so exciting and apart, he would always know.
*
Chari sat in silence for a time, before a clattering of pots and pans startled her. The gasp from her throat felt like a knife, and her eyes widened in fear, thinking they had finally come for her. Nothing followed, and she scolded herself softly for being spooked by what was little doubt Mack in the kitchen, cooking the night’s meal once again.
Slipping out of bed, she covered her nudity quickly, wrapping cloth around leg and arm and breast and binding all in strands of red beads. A ba
sin was carved atop her dresser, the water in it a bit dirty and in need of changing, but it served well enough to see her purple hair straightened and her face cleaned before she emerged from her room.
Chari walked down the hall at a careful pace, moving through the shadows toward the living chamber, which was alight with several lamps. The sound of a knife pounding the cutting board in a steady rhythm came to her right ear; coarse fabric sliding against metal to the left.
“Evenin’ to ya, Charsy!”
Mack waved with one hand while the other continued to dice the reddish stalk of a juumus. She waved back, wincing a little at the vegetable’s bitter aroma. He kept cutting, and she watched for a moment, wondering if he smelled anything at all.
He’s not really like me at all, is he?
On the couch, Jean was napping, clad in black and red like an ill omen, the spikes of her barrette digging into Chari’s cushions. Flynn sat on the floor before her, hunched over the coffee table, and it was him for whom she felt the greatest contempt—for being something she wanted to believe in, something just a little beyond her own world. What he really was and why he’d lied, she no longer cared to know. She needed him gone, needed her space to herself. She’d made a mistake letting people in, she admitted that, and she knew now that if her surface secrets could be drawn up so quickly, deeper truths would follow. That she wanted to be more honest made it all the worse that people like these could bring it out in her.
An urge came up in her to rectify her every failing, to unlock her attic and retrieve every piece of religious decorum she’d hidden away. As soon as she was rid of the three, Chari resolved to be a better priestess, a better Saryu, and keep her place in the world, however lonely it was.
“Chariska,” Flynn greeted her, glancing up from his work. Whatever strange device he’d brought in a few nights ago was on the table in pieces, and he was wiping it down with a rag he had taken from one of her cupboards. “I’ll have the mess cleaned up. I would have done it sooner, but I didn’t have everything I needed and didn’t want to chance losing something on an unsteady ship.”
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