House of Sand and Secrets

by Cat Hellisen

  Carien narrows her eyes. “There’s talk.” But it seems something in my tone has warned her off, because she sits back with a sudden easy grace and looks around. “Where’s that damn servant? Ives lets the Hobs get away with murder here.”

  The honey-blonde laughs. “Hardly surprising, given his predilections.”

  The women all smirk together.

  I take their lapse of interest in me as an opportunity to gather myself. Scriv. So much of it in this room, and there is only one type of magic that calls for such quantities in these social situations. Readers. Damn it. All of them? I eye the group warily.

  Carien’s moments of looking not-quite at me are explained. Now that I’m aware of it, I can see how their interactions with each other are careful, with a slick layer of surface agreement that indicates heavy emotional shielding.

  There is no way to be truly hidden around them. If I’d been able to go on to University, I would have learned some shielding techniques – enough that I could at least misdirect – but even that is a trick that only a few really get the knack of.

  This is why we War-Singers and Saints loathe the Readers so. There is no perfect way to hide the lies, the insecurities, and the complexities of engagement. The best I can do is focus on some very strong emotion, something so powerful it will blank out all others. Very few people have something big enough to work. Love certainly isn’t enough. However, I am lucky.

  Lucky. If that’s what one wants to call it. My fingers twitch, and I force myself to remember the things I did.

  Dash’s face as I cut him off in a nightmare world, willing him to die. The scratch on Owen’s cheek, sentencing him to death. I ran away from my family and my future, only to destroy it. Only to end up with a future that is hardly better than the one I tried to escape. And people died for my rebellion. Dash and Owen were merely the ones whose names I knew.

  These things are me. This is my guilt. And, beyond that, I have the time I wasted in not killing my brother straight away, and the innocents who died because of that.

  The guilt hits me solidly and the blackness fills my throat.

  Across from me Destia shifts, turning a little to stare at me in confusion.

  Carien narrows her eyes, smiles grimly, and taps her fingers along the wooden arm rest of her chair. We watch each other, waiting to see who will make the next move, and what it will be. She is like a little snake, ready to strike.

  They’re interested in the bats, and that interests me. MallenIve society detests them as vermin. It’s not the done thing to show any fascination. I need to draw these women out a little and find out what they know. If it’s true that Carien and her cronies know that the ba– the vampires are magical, then how long before they have them condemned to death, or worse, used to replace scriv dust – their teeth and bones ground to powder and snorted from little glass spoons?

  It must not happen. I pull my guilt around me, let it seethe. “How do you mean magical?” I affect my best tone of bumbling confusion. “I must confess that the idea strikes me as somewhat ludicrous, certainly I–” I pause, mouth still open then shut it with a decisive snap. I flush, intensify the guilt. There. Let them make of that what they want.

  “Yes?” Carien waits.

  Oh yes. Hook and line. I look down at my hands. My fingers are curled up around each other, clinging to secrets. “I, it’s . . . .” I look up and catch her amber gaze, “complicated.”

  The women have drawn closer, hemming me in. Carien hisses a pleased little laugh. “Oh now,” she says. “We’re friends. Nothing you say here will spread to other ears. We keep so many secrets. We victims of marriages must, after all, stick together.”

  The women smile and nod, heads wavering like rinkhalses. “Come on,” they say in soothing hisses.

  “It’s like this,” I begin, and take a deep fluttering breath. In truth, this is harder to do than I expected, perhaps because in my lies there is an element of truth that I must face. “I have – have touched it,” I whisper.

  “So?” Carien leans back and observes me amusement.

  Irritation sparks. She’s not letting me reel her in. “Well,” I say, and raise my hands in a helpless gesture. “You know.”

  She’s tapping again, her eyes hooded as she waits. “Know what?”

  Damn. Damn it all. “Perhaps, there is something,” I say, and hope that I can come back from this without condemning Jannik.

  The women are all silent, exchanging glances. I tamp down my frustration and think again about Dash and Owen and death. Guilt, guilt, guilt. It’s awful, and I hold on to it fast. The guilt works in my favour – let them believe I am so disgusted with myself for touching Jannik. And that thought leads on to others, to the night I spent sleeping next to him, and how I could feel the magic rippling between us, feather soft. It seems so long ago. Funny how a matter of months can stretch out to fill enough longing for a lifetime.

  It’s the honey-blonde who breaks the silence. “It’s addictive.”

  I raise my head. “Is it? I haven’t let myself… . ” The news they know this is unexpected. And opens up all kinds of horrendous possibilities. A House can buy a bat for three pieces of silver. A fair amount – not enough to cripple their finances, but certainly enough that it’s an investment that would require some thought. And the only possible use I could see the Houses having for the bats is to take their bones and teeth as some kind of scriv replacement, the same way we de-horn the unicorns. Except that these women are the wealthiest of the wealthy, and their veins are grey with scriv. They don’t need substitutes.

  “Addictive how?”

  “Surely you should know better than us,” Carien says, her voice sweetened with sugar-cane. “There’s something in the skin, the oils of the body. Sudors.” She frowns. “It’s better – stronger – under emotional stress.”

  And now I’m utterly lost. Here is something I truly did not know, though I concede it makes an awful kind of sense. “Perhaps I misunderstand,” I say slowly. “You think they … perspire magic?”

  “So it seems. From what we’ve heard.”

  This is ridiculous. How do the MallenIve Houses know more about the vampires than I do? “I am afraid I don’t really see how it’s possible.”

  “Oh very possible,” says Carien. “And who’s to say there isn’t more to it, that the magic doesn’t run deeper?” She keeps her eyes on me as she says it, and I find myself drawn into the amber, caught like an insect.

  “I – that seems-” Unlikely dies on my tongue. I force a laugh instead. “No, most definitely not. Is a sandwyrm magic? A riverdrake? Sometimes the things that sprang from magic are merely monsters and animals. The bats are just more human-shaped than others.” My stomach churns as I say this, but I know my mask is perfect. This is just another skill I learned from a childhood in House Pelim.

  Carien glances about at the others. Destia raises one eyebrow, then seems to shrug in consent. The other three women bite their lips, look down, or nod immediately. Eventually they come to a private agreement.

  “It’s been most rewarding talking to you.” Carien stands in dismissal. “I’ll speak to my husband on your behalf.”

  My interview is at an end, and I have achieved something. Only, Gris be damned if I know what. Carien gives me a final, secret smile that just barely twitches the corners of her mouth, and a shudder runs through me, a thrill of something that could be desire or fear. Pretty things, I must remind myself as a I press one cold hand to my heated cheek. They are dangerous.

  * * *

  At our next dinner with Harun and Isidro we arrive to find a cadre of thin-lipped dour servants scraping the front walls clean with soap and rags. The smell of faeces is ripe, and despite the industry of the servants I can still read the word BATFUCKER written in grey milk-paint across the white wash.

  “Lovely,” says Jannik, his voice dull. He makes no move to get out of the carriage, and I’m inclined to follow his lead and just have the coachman take us back home.

>   A servant is scraping away the B, and we watch it erode under his hands.

  “This could be us one day,” Jannik says. “You do realize.”

  “No.” I lift my chin, and gather my skirts. “It will not.”

  “Oh really. You think there’s some way you can stop all their hatred, bleed it out of them with leeches?”

  I can’t answer him. I stand on the wide stone paving, listening to the gentle snorting of the nillies in their traces, of the cluck and mutter of the servants as they wring out sudsy water and wash away the filth that MallenIve has thrown at the Guyin’s door. “I won’t allow it,” I say finally, and Jannik just laughs sadly at me.

  “You’re not Mallen Gris,” he says. “People won’t follow your lead merely because you say so.”

  “No.” We’re almost at the front doors, and the servants step out of our way. Their stares are angry, grudging. They hate us. They hate Isidro, and they will hate Jannik. “I’m not a mad man, and people won’t be using my name as a curse.”

  Jannik glances at the servants, shrugs. “You might just be surprised one day,” he says as a serving girl leads us gracelessly inside.

  But now the thought is in my head. How long before people attack us in the street, daub obscenities across our house, ostracise us from MallenIve society? I don’t want to become like the Guyins, but nor do I want to be caught up in the web of Readers and Saints and War-Singers who run the Houses. People like Carien who would gleefully skin my husband just to see if she could strip the magic right out of him. Magic she shouldn’t know about or be interested in.

  Not everyone feels it, Jannik told me. And those who do, don’t mention it. Most people have to touch the vampires before they feel anything, and no one wants to admit that they have. It’s like taking out an advertisement in the Courant telling the world you enjoy molesting goats.

  There is a kind of safety for the vampires in the city’s hatred of them. But I think that safety is growing thin and small and well-used. If the woman of the Houses are talking freely among themselves, then the word will spread soon enough, perhaps even to the ears of those with real power and a lust for magic. To the palace itself.

  And perhaps it’s too early to begin worrying. I am grasping at nightmares and finding only mist.

  Through dinner I find I cannot stop staring at Isidro’s skin, as if somehow, should I glare at him for long enough, all his mysteries will come seeping out. It’s easier to watch him than to do the same to my husband. Every time I look at Jannik, my eyes slide away, as if there is something there my brain refuses to acknowledge.

  Perhaps it is simply that Isidro has an easier face upon which to look. He is startling, that is certain. I do not think I have ever seen someone as beautiful, and I, who only paint flowers and sticks, wish I had the talent to set him down in inks, and the courage to ask.

  “Something terribly exciting about my face, Pelim?” he snaps.

  “Not at all,” I say quietly. “Should there be?”

  I have no idea why he hates us so much. Something about Jannik’s family, and the gulf between the two of them. Every time he looks at Jannik, his whole face twists, making it the closest it can get to ugly.

  Rumour says the Lord Guyin bought Isidro from one of the three MallenIve rookeries. In Pelimburg there are no rookeries. All the vampires are members or servants of one of the free Houses. Here, things are more than a little different. The vampires are not free. They are born into the rookeries where they serve out their time as whores, or as night-soil collectors.

  A rookery vampire does make a little coin off each transaction, and there’s the elusive goal of buying their own way free. But the truth of it is that they make so little their only true escape is to be bought as a servant and freed. If one is lucky enough to be bought out, Gris alone knows what their new owners want with them. I think of Carien’s face, in lamp-light. Her eagerness.

  If I am correct, Jannik’s family, House Sandwalker, did buy some of MallenIve’s vampires for a while, sinking their fortune into buying the freedom of rookery whores. They would have brought their people down to Pelimburg, far from the memories of this awful city. It may be this is why Isidro hates Jannik so: because he had to buy his own mockery of freedom with his looks.

  I glance at Harun, who is supping more on wine than on the roast trout and milk-and-lemon soup his kitchens have prepared for us. Again. The skin under his eyes is pouched and his hand tremors a little, sometimes. I wonder what he is trying to drown inside himself.

  What is it that made Harun buy Isidro and keep him as a lover? For myself I saw no other way to escape my family while minimizing their disgrace than by entering this farcical marriage, and Jannik is at least from a powerful House. But what kind of man throws away his inheritance, his future, for some spoiled pretty thing?

  For the shit on the walls and the hatred of everyone around him?

  He is either a madman or an idiot. Certainly, he is a drunk.

  “Felicita,” Jannik says, his voice very soft, “perhaps you could tell them of what you heard at House Ives.” I spoke of it only a little to Jannik, just told him that Carien has strange ideas about vampires. Uncomfortable ones. He seemed to brush my disquiet away by telling me that only certain people were sensitive to the vampire magic and could be affected by it.

  Does that make me special, then? I’ve never seen myself as particularly sensitive, although my control over scriv-based magic is very fine.

  I think Jannik is wrong. It has to do with physical and emotional connection and not on any inherent ability.

  But that sounds too much like the fancies of women, pinning all the world on fate, and so I have said nothing. Because truly – should I say to him I think I can feel his magic because we’re meant to be together? What a stupid thing.

  A stupid childish thing.

  “The Houses,” I say, then find myself wondering how to put it.

  Harun raises one eyebrow, drains his glass, and beckons for another bottle.

  “Fascinating,” says Isidro.

  I swallow, glance at him then continue. “Some of the women from the Houses seem to have this ridiculous notion that the vampires are magical. That their magic can be accessed, with the right … tools.”

  “House women are idiots,” Harun says, and it takes all my self-control to not throw one of his own plates at his head.

  Isidro stays quiet.

  The rest of the mealtime conversation is stilted and uncertain, but after the desserts, Isidro walks outside to take fresh air and Jannik follows him. Through the long blue glass of the garden doors, I see them standing shoulder to shoulder, and they are talking.

  I’m uncertain if I should join them. Something about their stance seems so oddly intimate, as if the rest of the world does not exist. I suppose I should be happy they are being brought together, even if it is by something as grotesque as Carien’s notions. Jannik could use a friend in this city.

  Harun comes up quietly, and stops just behind me. I don’t turn back to look at him, just listen to him pouring himself another glass, the soft liquid slap as he drinks. He’s watching them, like I am.

  “Looks like they’re finally getting on,” I say, and keep my voice light. “That’s good”

  “Is it,” Harun says flatly.

  I flush. He has merely echoed what I think, that I was happier when Jannik and Isidro had nothing in common, no little black ribbons to tie them to each other. “We all need friends,” I say. I still cannot bring myself to look back at Harun. I keep watching the two of them, though they have made no move and seem to be merely staring out over the garden, still talking. There is a space between them. “Someone who understands us.”

  Jannik and Isidro, despite whatever differences they have, will always have more in common with each other than with either of us, I realize. We will never truly understand what it is to be them, to feel the needs they feel, the iron laws under which they live. The people will write on our walls – mine and Harun’s �
�� but they will spit in Jannik’s and Isidro’s faces and pull the teeth from their skulls, strip their bones and leave their meat to rot on a rubbish heap.

  That is the future that is waiting if people like Carien become too interested in them. Perhaps it would be easier just to run again, find some other place where we can go. And nothing will change. “Perhaps it is better for the two of them to have each other.”

  “Do you always give up your partners so easily?” Harun says. “Or only when you realize how much effort they will cost you to keep?”

  I swallow, stare, count the seconds out before Jannik turns away from Isidro, their conversation now over, and walks back up to the wide glass doors. And to me. “Effort?” I say. “Or silver?” Finally, I glance over my shoulder and meet Harun’s eyes. “I don’t need to keep mine on a leash, Guyin.”

  My stomach hurts as I say it.

  * * *

  It is morning, and the dry, sage smell of dogleaf blows through the open windows, perfuming the Pelim apartments. Magic shifts through the breakfast room. It is calm, quiet as sunshine. I let the feel of it roll over my skin, and close my eyes, relax. This is Jannik’s attraction.

  No. This is exactly the kind of thing Carien and her cronies meant. I may have shrugged off the yoke of scriv, but here I am replacing it with something else. And I don’t even mean to. I tighten my fingers around my cutlery and take a deep breath, open my eyes, and make myself watch him. He is a person; not a drug, not a collection of bones and skin to be ground to dust.

  Jannik is sitting with his head bowed, the morning Courant spread out before him. No breakfast dishes clutter his side of the table. A lock of black hair slips forward, and he tucks it back behind an ear with an unconscious gesture. He’s frowning. Every morning we meet at breakfast. I eat. He reads. We pass the opening of the day in a companionable routine that to others, would look for all the world as natural and normal as any other marriage. It is also often the only time we see each other.