One of the men had already taken the liberty of stripping away her messenger bag and rifling through it. She didn’t fight him. “She has nothing!”
His companion peered into the bag and reached inside for her wallet. They both turned away from her to examine their treasure. Fury replaced panic, and the irate pounding of her heart thundered in her ears as the boys held up her bag and turned it over then unloaded its contents onto the puddled gravel. She had nothing to fear from these two after all. Novices.
Tristan slid the fighting knife out from under her shirt. She gripped the knife where the handle met the blade, its double edge biting into her flesh, and slammed the metal hilt into the back of his neck. He crumpled to the ground. His companion gaped at her as the bag fell from his hands.
“Tell you what,” she said. “You pay me, and I let you go.”
He swung at her. He wasn’t more than thirteen, his face still smooth and round with baby fat. She grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. He thrashed uselessly against a girl who was impossibly stronger than he was, and finally began to cry.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I really don’t. But I can and I will, so listen, eh? You don’t steal from people anymore. Got it?”
He gritted his teeth and nodded several times. “They sell my sister. They said they sell me too, to the men who own the granite mines. They can’t feed seven of us.”
He could be lying; his family might be the richest in Lagos, but something in his eyes, the fear that was not fear of her, suggested truth.
“Here.” Tristan let go of his arm and pressed a few bills into his palm. “Get your friend and go.”
“God bless you, miss.” He tugged his friend up by the back of his collar, and together they half-stumbled, half-ran out of the alley and into the muggy streets. Tristan gathered the scattered contents of her messenger bag. At least they hadn’t dumped her clothes. Adrenaline surged through her veins, but the violence had awakened something else, too.
Tristan gazed at the knife. Her wound had already healed, but the blade had nicked the boy’s skin as well. Barely more than a scratch yet enough to leave a few drops of blood glistening on the edge.
She carefully traced her tongue along the blade and collected each precious globule into her mouth.
~
“How far is Eket?” Tristan asked a cab driver outside the Akwa Ibom Airport.
The driver appraised her in silence, his gaze moving up and down as his lips spread in a slow, toothy smile. She understood he meant to rape her, or to traffic her once they reached Eket. A young woman who sounded but didn’t appear Western, traveling alone, practically begged to be victimized. Her unusual features made her exotic to Nigerians and Europeans alike. He’d fetch a respectable price for her. Nothing personal; women were just another commodity in this place.
Tristan smiled in return. Security, where it was even present, was not security of the kind found in the States or Canada. The knife lay against her side under her T-shirt, its tip tucked into her waistband. The Hunter she sought had nothing to teach her; she needed only her knives. Maybe a bola or shuriken, a little explosives expertise, some flexibility, and a pair of soft leather pants. But there she was, looking for the girl, because something in Zsofika’s tone had imparted a worrisome urgency.
“Forty-one kilometer, miss. I take you there?”
“Yes, please.”
He opened the door, and she tossed her bag inside before sliding in beside it. Her bare arms stuck to the leather seat. The car had no functioning A/C, and the open windows did little to circulate anything but the stale tropical air that smelled of approaching rain.
“Where do you go in Eket, miss?”
“There’s a hotel by the river, eh? Near the stadium.”
The eyes gazing back at her in the rearview mirror constricted. “Hotel is abandoned.”
“But there are children kept there by a charity. I read about it.”
His eyebrows knit together, forming a fat black caterpillar across his forehead. “You don’t want to go messing with those children, miss. Bad things happen.”
“They’re kids.” She shifted so he could not see her body behind his seat as she slipped the knife out from under her shirt. “And you know what else?” Tristan pressed the point just beneath his jaw line. He clenched his teeth as sweat broke out on his forehead, and he curled his fingers in a death grip around the steering wheel. “Bad things happen to people who try to hurt me. Now shut up and drive. You’ll get your money, but if you touch me, I’ll kill you. Got it?”
He bobble-headed his answer, his trembling hands still clutching the wheel for dear life. “I drive you straight to Eket, miss, and then I go. I promise.”
“Thank you.” Tristan sat back but made sure that, if he happened to glance at her in the mirror, he saw she had not let go of her weapon.
The driver didn’t speak another word as the cab chugged along Oron-Ikot Akan Road. After a long and uncomfortable silence, he stopped just before a bridge in a bend at the Ibeno River, cocked his head to the right, and waited for her to pay him.
Tristan peered out the window at the barren parking lot overgrown with weeds. The derelict building stood just meters away. Facing the river’s serene gray waters, it must have been beautiful once. She slapped several bills into the driver’s hand then slid out of the car and dragged her bag out with her. She’d barely closed the door before the driver sped off.
Tristan crossed the lot toward the building that wept paint flakes and roof tiles. Already she heard children’s voices rising from the smashed windows. Shouts and, too frequently, cries of pain.
She pushed open the door hanging by one hinge, and stepped into the shadowed lobby.
Chapter Seven
Anasztaizia hurried down the hall, away from the ispán and into her new room. Large glass-paned windows offered impressive views, just as he had promised, of the dark and ancient forest consecrated by the moon Herself, where the king and his scent hounds tracked hare and fox. Anasztaizia thought she might pass many an afternoon perched on the window seat, gazing out at the wild hunting grounds.
The fragrance of evergreen perfumed the chamber. A bed twice as wide as Anasztaizia’s old one and outfitted in the fine Eastern silks her mother so loved lay against one wall. She should have loved the cheerfully painted room, and yet the space filled her with a premonition of inexplicable dread.
A knock sounded softly upon her door. Anasztaizia, sitting on the edge of the bed, called out over the deafening thump of her heart, “Come in.”
Ispán Gergo glanced around the room and smiled, evidently proud of his renovations. He was a tall man, and handsome, which accounted for his successes more than he cared to admit—a capable administrator, even he would confess the treasurer surpassed him in competence. At thirty-seven, his beard was still a rich brown, free of gray, and his dark hair curled down to his shoulders. He lost weight during the final weeks of Lady Katinka’s illness, so his cheeks were gaunt, and the paunch that began to assert itself around his middle during the winter months had melted away with the snow. His steely eyes might have been kind once, a time long before Anasztaizia’s memory. He was as much a ghost as his lady; only he didn’t know it yet.
“How do you like it?” he asked, sitting beside her. If she liked anything, it certainly wasn’t his intimacy. She imagined herself a deer in the wood, shot with one of his arrows, unable to escape. Imagined him leaning over her, defiling her with the demonic heat of his hands and breath on her dying flesh.
Felt it.
Anasztaizia hoped he did not notice as she edged ever so slightly away from him. She wished he would leave her alone. “It’s lovely. You were right about the windows. It has been a month since Mother died. Is the mourning period nearly over?”
A cloud passed over his face.
Anasztaizia feared his bouts of melancholy, when he locked himself in the royal bedchamber and forbade any intrusions upon his bereavement, far less than the buoya
nt madness driving him to these inexplicable acts of kindness. She enjoyed the break from his attentions, though some dark corner of her mind wondered what he did in that room, alone with all those awful paintings. Perhaps he would send her back to the middle of the donjon and forget her again. She hoped.
“We will never stop mourning her,” he said flatly. The strange faraway expression descended over his face like a veil.
“Of course not.” Anasztaizia glanced out the window. She wanted to sprout wings and fly away, like the magical princesses of myth. “I only meant the official mourning period.”
“Yes, yes. We will have a feast to mark her passing. But the treasurer is correct, as usual. Life must go on, and so it shall.” The light returned to his eyes. “It is nearly your birthday, and I want to give you a gift. I will give you anything you desire.”
Were Anasztaizia the ignorant girl he desired her to be—and still ostensibly believed she was—she might not have recognized the dreadfulness of his request. But she had never been her father’s little girl, and he did not dote upon her as another father might.
Anasztaizia felt faint. She inhaled deeply and forced as genuine a smile as she could muster. She had to play along until she spoke to Gazsi. “That’s quite generous, Father. I would like a dress. I have so few of my own, and I hate to keep disturbing Mother’s things. Would you have a dress made for me?”
“I see I must prove myself worthy of your love, for I have neglected you all these years. It is only right I atone for my actions. I will do this task for you, Lady. I assume Dorika has your measurements, though if my eyes do not deceive me, you have the same dimensions as your mother.” Ispán Gergo lifted her hand to his lips and then rose from the bed. “Rest now. I have asked much of you these past weeks.”
Perhaps some kinds of madness are contagious. Why, any girl in your position would be happy her father loves her at last. Pity it took a tragedy to bring you together.
His footfalls faded away outside her door. When she no longer heard them, Anasztaizia slowly opened the door and peered into the hallway, fearing he would pounce on her from the darkness like a wolf. She tiptoed a few paces until she had reached the privy, and closed the door behind her. It was cold, for the ventilation window had no glass. Even that did not rid the room of its stench, but Anasztaizia’s stomach was already churning. She leaned over the hole in the wooden seat and vomited.
~
The trader sat alone in what might have been a library, perhaps, under an educated and more open-minded lord. Here it was another mostly empty room, with a long table and several chairs, good for meetings and little else. Exhausted from the four-hour funeral feast and her father’s carrying on, Anasztaizia caught a golden flash as she passed by on the way to her room. Coins, she noted; three of them, that the trader tossed onto the wooden surface repeatedly.
“What are you doing?”
A ghostly smile flitted across the trader’s lips, as if he had been expecting her. “Something I’m certain your father would not appreciate. Your Grace.”
“I am no one’s Grace.” Anasztaizia slid into a chair across from him. Gazsi’s warning bubbled briefly to the surface of her mind, a drowning man’s last breath. Then it was gone. “Do you have a name, trader?”
“You may call me Yongnian.”
“You were acquainted with my mother.”
“Yes, we spoke now and then.” The coins gleamed like an animal’s eyes in the dark, before clattering onto the table. Their spinning, the metallic sound of their oscillations against the wood, transfixed her. With a small square cut into the center of each one, they were unlike any coins she had ever seen.
“She was a kind woman. Whenever I came to your land, she offered her home to me. She deserved a better fate.” A shadow passed over his face. Few claimed any sort of relationship to the lady; Ispán Gergo would not have it. Despite his protestations of love, she was in the end another object for his possession alone.
“Then you were friends.”
“Of a sort, perhaps. She was a generous customer. But now that the mourning period is over, I expect this will be my last visit.”
“You dislike my father. I can tell. It is strange how many do.”
“Well,” said Yongnian, his smile creating the only lines on a strangely ageless face, “you will understand soon enough, if you don’t already.” He stroked his beardless chin. “Shall I toss the coins for you?”
“What is it they do?”
“It is an ancient form of divination called the I Ching.”
“Divination?” A forbidden art carrying with it the penalty of death. Anasztaizia’s heart fluttered with both panic and excitement, much as it did when she studied the so-called heresies with Gazsi, sacrilegious only because the Church chose not to understand them. A grave transgression, but her rejection of anything the king held dear was almost automatic.
“As I said, your father surely would not approve.”
The statement made his offer all the more attractive. “Yes. Toss these coins of yours.”
Yongnian gathered the coins into his palm and then let them fall. His smile faded almost immediately.
“What is it?”
“They have all landed on the same side. The first line is a six.”
“What does that mean?”
“The abyss. Misfortune. There is much evil around you, and you are growing used to it. This can only lead to suffering.”
A chill like a trickle of cold water raced down Anasztaizia’s spine. Flames still crackled in the fireplace, but their warmth did not reach her. Yongnian tossed the coins five more times. Then he sat in silence for a few moments, his hands folded in an elegant steeple before him.
“The k’an. The abysmal.”
“What is it you see, trader?”
“You are a great light enclosed in darkness. Your soul is trapped in a body it longs to escape.”
Another involuntary shiver pebbled the skin on Anasztaizia’s arms. “The divine spark,” she said, “of which the false creator keeps us ignorant.”
Yongnian scooped the coins into a pouch and tucked it within his robes. “Your heart grows heavy, Lady.”
“Should it not? You see nothing but evil and darkness before me. I know who means me harm. I know he has gone mad.”
“Do not absolve him of his crimes by calling it “madness.” All others who have ever set foot in your land recognize what he keeps secret from his family in a cloak of piety. Do you not wonder why no princes call upon you, why no other traders will enter this castle? Long before her death he had turned to wickedness in pursuit of his goals.”
“What are you saying, Yongnian? For my own safety, I must know.”
“There is darkness in the hearts of all men, and it shall be their downfall. But some learn how to harness its power.” His narrow eyes burned with firelight. “Some learn how to pass their power on to others who have earned their wisdom. These are the ones who will change the world.”
“You speak as though you are not a man yourself.”
Again the strange smile. He rose from the table, his robes cascading about him like an otherworldly waterfall. Yongnian touched her cheek in what would have been an impious gesture but for the strange vision of him doing the same to her mother. A transmission of memory, wanting her to comprehend though he could not or would not speak the words aloud. She did not understand how she knew this, and yet she was not frightened. His touch did not bear the malevolent intent of her father’s.
“My people believe everyone has two souls. The weaker one disappears when we die. But sometimes the stronger one is so great it will refuse to leave the body. You see, there is a secret to eternal life. But we must pay a steep price for it. We learn the secret only when terrible harm has befallen us, yet it is in the strength of our soul that we refuse to die.”
“You speak of impossible things,” Anasztaizia said softly, stepping back from him. “Ungodly things.”
“Your god is only one of many. Who i
s to say he has all the answers? Even your interpretation of him is not that of your father’s. Does that not in fact make your god a different one than his?”
“Yongnian, please. He will burn us both if he hears such things.”
“Do not be afraid, Lady. Though you must suffer much, you will learn the secret, and it will transform all you have ever known. You will escape, though perhaps not in the expected manner.” Yongnian offered a final close-mouthed smile before he whisked past her into the hall.
Anasztaizia sank to the floor beside the fireplace, her tunics crumpling around her, and stared into the flames. She stoked the blackened logs until only faintly glowing ash remained, and wondered if she would ever feel warm again.
Chapter Eight
The lobby’s oppressive air was ripe with mildew from carpeting that never quite dried due to the leaking roof and the humidity, and mold spotted the damp, peeling wallpaper. Tristan dropped her travel bag just inside the door. The children would swarm upon it like fire ants, these “witches” who brought illness and death yet were incapable of conjuring their own food or a decent place to live. The sheer ignorance maddened her, but human stupidity had reached epidemic levels the world over.
The sounds she heard from outside ceased; the children had scattered, even the older boys who stayed there. While, from what she’d read, they were used to bureaucrats from one agency or another dropping by to feed or clothe them, they did not recognize this foreigner. She might be there on behalf of their parents or pastor, sent to burn them, break their bones, drive nails into their skulls.
Tristan followed the sound of feet padding up the staircase, a child’s step, light and quick. She stayed out of sight so as not to alarm the kid and walked slowly down the second-floor hall, along a faded carpet stained with body fluids. Each step awakened the stench of piss lying dormant within its fibers. Stronger still was the aroma of stale sweat and of feces hidden in the darkest corners, so rich she almost tasted it in the back of her throat. Tristan covered her nose and began examining the rooms themselves. The doors on some had jammed shut, swollen with moisture; she did not waste her time on those. Insects buzzed in from the smashed windows, more species of fly than she cared to count, and spiders of monstrous sizes wove their webs within the shattered panes to catch them. The occasional lizard on the wall ogled her with cold, reptilian eyes.
Those of My Kind Page 5
