Ink in the Blood

by Kim Smejkal

  “On the seventh night plus three minus two.” Anya answered, flashing Celia a tense smile.

  “Exactly so,” Kitty Kay said. “On that night, you’ll audition in front of our audience. You’ll have to convince me, the crowd, and every member of the Mob that you’re the best thing to ever happen to us.”

  Anya flushed a deeper red. Celia wrung the pillow. In front of the audience?

  Lupita whooped in delight. “They can do it! Huzzah, my lovelies—”

  “One warning, though.” Kitty Kay cut off Lupita’s celebration, staring straight at Celia. “If you make a fool of me or my people, the Mob will turn on you. The crowd will still get their money’s worth. If you fail, the show will go on.”

  That hovered in the air for a minute. Only Lupita made noise, throwing out some chuckles and juggling them about.

  Then Kitty Kay laughed, and beside her, Anya deflated in relief.

  A joke. An exaggeration. Over the top was the name of their business. Even the mime had staunchly held on to his mimeness when faced with outsiders.

  Celia laughed too. For a minute she’d heard unbridled menace in Kitty Kay’s tone.

  Still, even as peels of half-drunk laughter boomed from Kitty Kay’s red lips, Celia knew that the audience would be the least of their worries. Kitty Kay and her Mob would be much harder to sway.

  Chapter 6

  Before the sun gave any thought to rising, a hard rap on Celia’s door woke her from a delicious dream starring a shimmering masked performer who’d swallowed a tiny megaphone. She moaned and rolled over. Come back, plague doctor, come back . . .

  Another hard knock at the door. When Celia didn’t answer, Dante barged in right on schedule. He’d made fixing Celia’s punctuality his personal mission. He strode over to the window and ripped open the curtains as if they were her eyelids. “Angeli save you, Celia, you’ll be late. Get up, up, up.” He went to her rickety dresser and began tossing clothes over his shoulder. “Do you always have to choose black?” Pants, blouses, cravats, suspenders, and knickers flew through the air.

  Why yes, when the public answered the call for clothing donations, she instinctively grabbed anything roughly her size and black. She waited for Dante to say something about matching the color of her soul, but he was too busy scrutinizing every item in her wardrobe.

  A corset hit her face as she sat up. “Stick your nose in someone else’s underthings!” she said, flinging the corset back at him. “I’m up.”

  “Nope.” Dante’s blond hair matched his pale yellow suit; his bright green eyes matched the decorative accents. Though his outfit was strongly suggestive of leek soup, Dante pulled it off; he’d be handsome in a potato sack. Stupid perfection. Stupid Dante. “I’m dressing you myself and hauling you outside. Get up.”

  “I’m not letting you dress me! Get the hell out of my room!”

  He paused from his assessment of her clothing. Stupid crooked smile. “It’s not like I haven’t seen what you have to offer, Cece.”

  Dante had been the second one to make Celia’s body betray her, and far too recently. Unlike with Zuni, they hadn’t stayed friends. They were . . . something else. Remnants of temporary insanity. Foolishly, she’d thought his green eyes danced with a hidden mischief, and for months she’d tried to coax it out. She’d finally realized what it was: a strange brew of ego, apathy, and self-preservation that she didn’t have the energy to drink.

  She stood up and stomped her foot like a child. “Fine!”

  He primped and preened, fluttering around her like a butter­fly, tightening this, adjusting that. She glared through it all. “I hate Saturdays” was her only contribution to the conversation he kept trying to start. She and Anya had better things to do than go to worship—​even the necessity of sleep had become a terrible inconvenience.

  Dante pulled a brush through her hair and straightened out her heavy block of bangs until each hair lay pin-straight and aligned perfectly. “I’ll trim your bangs later. You have such beautiful dark eyes, Celia. You shouldn’t hide them behind this wall.”

  She smiled. “That’d be nice, thanks.”

  His eyebrows knotted into a frown. “Really?”

  Celia snorted. “No. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Every Saturday was a soul-sucking snooze festival that went on for hours. And hours. And then even more hours. Celia stood in the front row with the other shorties, Anya and Dante behind her so if she dozed off, one of them would catch her if she listed backwards. Thoughts of plague doctors, phoenixes, and the coming audition would have lots of room to roam.

  On a raised platform in front of the main temple doors, High Mistico Benedict waited to bless and advise. Unsmiling middling and low mistico flanked him beside cauldrons full of copper kropi and silver virtues, ledger books open to document all proceedings. The mistico’s number one job requirement was a love of paperwork.

  The Chest Majestic’s gilded edges glinted behind them, catching every errant bit of sunlight. As Profeta’s most important relic, it held the only supply of Divine ink. The ink stained nothing and was inert most of the time, but it was sentient and alive in a way that creeped Celia out if she thought about it too long. The way it writhed when it sensed that a warm-blooded host was near. The way it could sense the memory of blood on the end of a bird’s feather, the only writing implement an inkling could use to control it. Celia had seen and felt the Divine ink only once—​the day she put her hands in the Chest Majestic so the ink could enter her bloodstream and make her an inkling forever—​and that had been more than enough.

  They put the Chest on display every Saturday worship, the only opportunity pilgrims had to bear witness to such an important artifact; otherwise it was in a vault, guarded more fiercely than the nation’s treasury.

  As Ruler Vacilando arranged herself on her personal balcony, showing as much of her inked skin as the crisp weather allowed, guards opened the main gates. The herd oozed in, prepared to wait their turn for a mistico’s attention and a closer view of the Chest Majestic.

  To entertain herself, Celia gave each pilgrim some dialogue.

  The mousy-looking, worn one: My dear neighbor, Iggy, is ill. Please, a blessing to unclog the phlegm in her chest? It rattles so. Sounds like she swallowed a frog! A tattoo telling her to soundproof her walls might grace her arm later.

  The snappy business tycoon with gold buckles: I don’t know whether to accept the position as high banker. Could the Divine offer guidance? I’m so important. StrutStrutStrut. He’d get an image of a coin purse on his chest.

  The parents pushing their young teenager forward, smiling and proud: Here, my Kid is good and strong. They can help in the kitchens or by washing the floors. We welcome a chance to aid in the Divine’s work. Thanks for the coin, huzzah! The youth looked stunned more than scared, and Celia’s gut clenched in sympathy. Zuni had probably looked the same a few years back.

  As the rain lightened, people shed their heavy cloaks and jackets. Nearly everyone boasted a tattoo; ink made nonbelievers believe, turned half believers into fervent ones. Magic staining their skin meant that the Divine cared for them.

  Celia searched for her work and glimpsed a tattoo of angel Gaia on the back of a worshiper’s neck that looked vaguely familiar. She recognized the bear claw peeking out from under a loose shirtsleeve; she’d been proud of that one.

  Another worshiper had a full sleeve of the nine levels of hell wrapped around his upper arm. Working on Anya, it had taken Celia more than a day and a half to complete. The temple had really wanted to drive their message home with him. He’d probably been an interesting soul leading an interesting life, before the ink.

  A finger poked her shoulder. She swatted her hand back and smacked Dante’s thigh. The stupid firmness of it made her palm sting.

  Then she saw the hand mirror: fresh, red around the edges.

  Branded on the forearm of Fiona of Asura.

  Drab and tired-looking, she held hands with a child on one side and
had a sleeping toddler tucked against her other shoulder. She didn’t look up from the cobblestones as they moved slowly forward, her heavy eyes half closed.

  The order had been specific about her vanity, yet this Fiona didn’t look like she even knew the word.

  A breeze pushed Fiona’s hair shawl down around her shoulders. She struggled to right it, dropping her child’s hand in her haste. But not before Celia saw the green-and-yellow bruise, the same colors as Dante’s leek-soup suit, wrapping her neck like a scarf.

  Whoever put that mark on her neck had large, strong hands. The imprints were so well-defined that Celia knew exactly where each finger had pressed in trying to choke life out.

  She froze.

  Only her eyes moved, tracking Fiona as she shuffled along. The tattoo Celia had given Fiona told her not to leave her partner. And there her partner was, walking beside her with a large, meaty, possessive hand on her lower back.

  Every tattoo was meant to guide or alter behavior, of course. Profeta was powerful because people believed that the ink came from their deity and that their deity knew them intimately.

  For years, Celia and Anya tried to find the source of the Divine orders they inked. If they were the Divine’s messengers, they thought it was their right to know how the orders came to be. Sneaking around the temple had become a full-time hobby for them, at least two years’ long, searching for the link between the Divine, the High Mistico ordained to execute her will, and the people. They’d expected a seer, perhaps. Or a heavily guarded scrying bowl. A secret chapel where the embodiment of the Divine lived. At one point Celia had been convinced that the huge statue of her was alive, truly seeing in six directions through stone, reporting somehow by magic. But what had they discovered?

  Bureaucracy.

  Mistico lived and worked all over the country. They listened, watched, and counseled. Their various reports, logs, and letters came to the temple in Asura. Lupita had said it felt like compassionate due diligence, not spying.

  High Mistico Benedict alone was in charge of writing Divine orders, so ultimately, only he knew whether he received inspiration from a deity or a report, although their scientific conclusion was that Divine commands were nothing more than the High Mistico’s nonsense.

  But it still affected the choices of those who believed, and in the case of a thin inkling line around a tiny six-year-old ankle or a hand mirror on Fiona of Asura, it could ruin lives.

  Celia was one of the messengers. She was part of the poison. It revolted her to see the evidence of her role walk right past her on tired legs.

  They needed out. Enough of being a part of the biggest hoax in Illinia.

  Their act needed to be so spectacular, the Mob couldn’t say no.

  Celia’s bees were finally buzzing in unison. Nothing was more spectacular than the power of the ink.

  Celia and Anya couldn’t expose their magic, but they would use it.

  They’d play like Diavala and be tricksters all the way.

  Chapter 7

  Zuni led Celia and Anya through the labyrinthine crypts via a dozen shortcuts, twisting and turning with practiced ease, not even bothering to light a lamp. A week had passed too quickly somehow, the reality of what they were determined to do affecting how time turned. Seven days ago, Celia had whispered to Anya, “I have an idea . . .” Six days ago, Anya had whispered back, “And then . . .” Three days ago, they whispered together, “Perfect.”

  Each night, Celia had told endless stories to Wallis and the fleas. About magical forests, wicked deeds, misunderstood love. Protection. Friendship. She’d whispered, “Sometimes what looks like betrayal is actually the biggest sacrifice.” She hoped that Wallis would understand, one day, why she couldn’t pull them into an uncertain life on the run. What an impossible decision it had been.

  And so many whispers with Zuni.

  Time had caught up to them. Only moments before, Celia and Anya had inked their last Divine tattoo. It was a fitting end.

  The band enlisting a new mistico was one of the few symbolic tattoos ingrained in the dogma, with no room for personal artistry. Anya inked a heavy black cuff all the way around Celia’s upper arm.

  This new mistico, Alesso Kazan, was to leave their shoe-repair business and bind themself to Profeta. The temple wanted them to serve.

  Anya didn’t close the thick band. As she and Celia always did, she left a hair’s length between the beginning and the end. It was always their riskiest move.

  Celia noticed. Her lips trembled ever so slightly as she held Anya’s eyes. Risking this now, when they were so close to escape, seemed like tempting fate. But she nodded.

  The mistico’s band was similar to the tattoos that summoned children to become inklings. If only the slim bands around their own ankles, appearing in the night when they were six, painful and scary, hadn’t been shackled so tight. If there’d been a flaw, a chink, maybe things would have been different. Maybe their parents would have seen.

  As Mistico Tranki inspected Anya’s work, Celia tilted her body against the lantern’s light, the tiny, blasphemous gap hidden in shadows. She stopped her trembling by sheer force of will, their habit of protecting each other as instinctual as breathing. The mistico didn’t notice the gap. They never did. For all their keen senses in searching for dissent, this was heresy of such magnitude, it was unfathomable to them.

  Anya had given Alesso Kazan a way out—​a sliver, a crack—​should they want to slip through it.

  A crack of light appeared as Zuni opened the back door, and they slipped through. “They’ll kill you eventually, Zuni,” Celia said, trying one more time to convince her to come. “You don’t belong here.”

  “I belong exactly here. I’ll be okay. No one else knows how I preserve the skulls so well. I’m the best. The only.”

  Damn, had she always been so arrogant? Celia nearly fainted with appreciation.

  “I’ll look out for Wallis, don’t worry,” Zuni said. “I’ll even look after Dante.” Then she had the gall to wink. Who did that at a farewell?

  Celia flung her arms around Zuni’s neck and didn’t want to let go.

  “I’ll miss you,” Zuni whispered.

  Anya nudged between them. She whispered in Zuni’s ear, pulling Celia away. “Only Zuni knows what’s best for Zuni. Accept her choice, Cece. We have to go.”

  With a lingering look, Zuni disappeared, swallowed up by the stone of the temple. Celia stared at the door. I’ll find so many feathers for you, Zuni. So many feathers. Every bird in the world is at risk for my plucking. It became Celia’s sad mantra as she and Anya made their way through the cemetery, crouching low, ears pricked up.

  With no money left to hire a gondola, they zigzagged through the cobblestoned streets and over the bridges of Asura. The Rover field was desolate when they arrived. Celia peered through the locked gate to the long row of colorful wagons, seeking signs of life—​a fire, people milling—​but nothing moved. Anya led the way around a few buildings to the next block, then the next, until they found a tree leaning over the fence.

  Celia’s belt buckle came undone as she dropped to the ground on the other side, but she didn’t bother tightening it. She didn’t straighten her hat.

  Anya rapped her knuckles against the door to the large wagon where they’d talked with Kitty Kay. When no one answered, she used the crank to lower the stairs. They were about to ascend when everything erupted.

  Three young people jumped out.

  One after another, flipping left, right, and straight over their heads, surrounding them. Their tenors moved as wildly as their bodies along three different spectrums, They, She, and He. Their skin tones were an array of pale white, soft beige, and deep reddish-brown, hinting at Illinian, Bicklandian, and Shiehan heritage. But they all wore the same black clothing—​a loose blouse over a long wrap skirt adorned with silver clips—​so similar in style to mistico that Celia cried out in alarm, thinking they’d walked straight into a trap.

  “How’d you get
in?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Your hat is crooked.”

  “Your buckle’s undone.”

  “Are they frozen?”

  The trio circled. Not in an intimidating way, but as if they’d discovered a pair of new creatures to examine under a magnifying glass.

  “My name is Anya Burtoni. This is Celia Sand. Kitty Kay knows us.”

  The one with warm beige skin and a mane of white hair in a thousand tiny braids frowned as she circled. “The Intruder and the Interloper. Yes.”

  The cut settled like a burr under Celia’s skin. “Kitty Kay invited us,” she said. “We’re ready to audition tonight, but we need to get the costumes together and our set done.”

  The white-haired one’s full lips twitched into a smile and she shrugged with exaggerated disregard. “That shouldn’t be a problem. If a few weeks of dress rehearsal isn’t enough, one day is plenty.”

  Anya put a steadying arm around Celia’s waist, sensing a brewing eruption. “So can we talk to Kitty Kay?”

  A nod sent her tiny braids into a free fall over her shoulders. “You can talk to her, but she won’t talk back.”

  Enough. Celia threw her hands up to the sky. “And what does that mean?” Anya’s hand squeezed Celia’s waist, telling her to rein in her frustration. This was their one chance.

  The trio stopped circling. The white-haired one, obviously spokesperson for the group, smiled even wider, the two small silver rings pierced through the edges of her lower lip stretching apart like cymbals about to clash. “You don’t know how things work around here, Intruder Anya Burtoni and Interloper Celia Sand, and with only one day, I’ll bet it’ll stay that way.” When her smile fell away, the rings in her lower lip settled like fangs.

  “But!” She clapped. “Kitty Kay told us to help, so help we will. I’m Lilac, that’s Caspian, and the quiet one is Sky.”

  Sky, the pale, quiet one, had a shaved head, except for a trail of long yellow hair leading to a high ponytail. They whooped so loudly at the introduction, it rattled through Celia’s brain; then they did a backflip as easily as if they were part grasshopper. These three were probably the stilt walkers Anya had admired.