Bright Smoke, Cold Fire

by Rosamund Hodge

  Runajo smiled in the way that she knew Miryo found insufferable. “Perhaps it means they want me to read the lost words in the Sunken Library.”

  Three pairs of eyes examined her. Runajo examined them right back. She could tell they all found the mark strange or suspicious to varying degrees—but what could they accuse her of? It was obvious the mark had been made by magic, and what magic could she have found last night except that of the vigil itself?

  That didn’t stop her heart from beating faster and faster until the High Priestess nodded thoughtfully and said, “Very well. You may rise, youngest of my Sisters, to shed your blood until you die.”

  For the rest of the day, Runajo was not alone: there were rites that must be observed for a newly made Sister. There was the briar tattoo to put on her chin, blood offerings for her to spill. Her eyes ached from exhaustion; her skin itched and ached from rapidly knitting itself back together under the healing ointment.

  She tried not to think of the Catresou girl waking up alone. She thought of little else.

  Even before I caught her, she was not like the other souls, Runajo told herself stubbornly. There has to be a reason. I will find it, I will get proof that I did not perform true necromancy, and then I will tell the others.

  Finally, well after the sun had gone down, she was allowed to rest. No longer would she sleep in the wide dormitory with the other novices, waking in the night to hear their rustling and snoring. Instead, she was sent to a proper cell: a small, white-walled room, furnished with no more than a woven mat to sleep on. When the door closed behind her, Runajo sank to the floor with a sigh of relief.

  For the past few hours, the constant attention had been like bugs crawling over her skin. Now she was alone. She was free.

  Runajo would sleep in this room every night until she died. Every day, she would have this freedom to look forward to, instead of the jostling and whispering of the other novices, Sunjai’s endless prattle and Inyaan’s infinite glares.

  Even if there had been no Ruining, perhaps Runajo would still have become a Sister, just for this solitude. This peace. Mahyanai girls were expected to take husbands or at least lovers, so they could provide heirs for their families. They had to share bedrooms with their kinswomen and handmaids. Runajo thought that if she had to share her life with anyone, husband or friend or servant, she would eventually despise that person and go mad.

  That probably made her quite terrible. But it also made her useful for the mission she had set for herself. She had nothing to hold her back.

  Except a not-quite-dead Catresou girl hidden away inside the walls of the Cloister.

  Runajo waited nearly an hour, just in case somebody came by to check on her, or Miryo wanted to mount a surprise inspection. Nothing happened.

  She rose and traced her fingers over the wall of her cell. She could feel the room she had fashioned, lurking within the structure of the Cloister.

  “Come back,” she whispered, and pressed her lips to the wall.

  For a moment she thought she had lost it. Then the door grew out of the wall and slid open, and Runajo stepped inside.

  The girl was gone.

  Runajo only had time for one gasp of surprise before she was knocked to the ground, and she found herself lying on her back, looking up at the wild-eyed Catresou girl, who had seized Runajo’s knife and was pressing it to her throat.

  10

  PARIS HAD KNOWN THE LOWER CITY would be dirty and dark.

  He hadn’t expected it to feel so dead.

  In the Upper City, the power of the Sisters of Thorn—the power that they fed with unholy sacrifices—lingered in every surface of the rock. It caused the dancing lights in the surface of the great dais when human blood was spilled upon it, and it made little stone flowers glow inside every home in the Upper City. It made the water run and the doors lock. And always, there was an indefinable sense that the city was alive, breathing, humming to itself, though the walls made no sound.

  Not so the Lower City.

  Here, the buildings were carved of dead gray rock. Some were colorless and grimy; others were painted with garish designs, still coated in a thin layer of grime. The streets were narrow, and stank: some of them because they had gutters full of refuse, others because they didn’t have gutters.

  It was a dead city. And it was riotously alive.

  It was like one of the great festivals, a hundred times over. The street swarmed with people, and it seemed that no two spoke the same language or had the same features. Crowds of children ran together through the streets. Sleek, well-groomed men in embroidered robes strode past ragged beggars. Mangy cats yowled for scraps or stalked pigeons across the rooftops.

  When the Ruining covered the world in death, whole kingdoms and peoples had perished. A small fraction had found their way to Viyara in time—but they had been thousands, and they had become more in the hundred years since. Only the Mahyanai and Catresou had come in enough numbers, and with their leadership intact, that they could sign the Accords with the Old Viyarans and win a place in the Upper City. The rest had to make their homes at the base of the city spire, and within a generation, a small cluster of buildings had become an enormous, writhing city.

  “Where now?” he asked.

  Romeo was standing still, staring around the street as if he had never seen it before. He’d been focused enough while helping Paris slip through one of the minor gates into the Lower City, but now he seemed like he might be turning back into the wild-eyed, senseless boy who had wanted to lie down in the sepulcher forever.

  And Paris had decided to trust him. He had followed him down into the Lower City, where he had never been before—and where he might get robbed and stabbed any moment.

  What had he been thinking? It was one thing to take idiotic risks with his own life, but if Paris died down here, there would be nobody to stop Lord Catresou. Nobody to save the Catresou clan from horrifying punishment when the City Guard found him out.

  “I want him stopped too,” said Romeo, looking back at him, more alive and resentful than he’d seemed a moment ago. “I will see it done.”

  “I didn’t—” Paris started, but fell silent, because even if he hadn’t said it, he’d thought it. And his thoughts were no longer his own. Every time he remembered that, he felt another little nauseous shiver.

  “And you’re her kin,” said Romeo. “So I will get you to safety. I owe her at least that much.”

  He started walking again, and dubiously, Paris followed him. The breeze was cool against his cheekbones and temples. He had taken off his mask during the desperate race to the sepulcher, dropped it sometime during the disastrous attempt at a bonding ceremony, and he had not remembered to grab it again as they escaped.

  It probably would have been a bad idea anyway, to run around the Lower City in such an elaborate, formal mask. But he was acutely, humiliatingly aware that his bare face was on display to everyone in the street, as if he were the lowest of servants, or not a Catresou at all.

  Suddenly memory caught him by the throat: Juliet, taking the white filigree mask from her face, and smiling with a kind of tremulous happiness that he had never seen in her.

  It wasn’t Paris’s memory.

  “Stop it,” he muttered, trying to build up the wall between them, but the clatter and bustle of the street kept distracting him. Romeo didn’t seem to have heard him; he turned down one of the narrow side streets and kept striding forward, remembering Juliet’s lips, warm and soft and parting as he kissed her—

  “Stop thinking of her,” Paris snarled, grabbing Romeo’s shoulder and wrenching him back around.

  Romeo flinched, his eyes going very wide, and cold horror clutched at Paris. He had ordered Romeo how to think. If it broke his mind—

  Then Romeo huffed out a laugh and said, “I can’t. I can’t stop thinking of her.” He smiled. “Your magic isn’t strong enough for that.”

  “You have no right,” Paris muttered, relieved and ashamed at once.

&nb
sp; He felt Romeo’s flicker of anger at the same moment he saw his mouth tighten.

  “She was my wife,” Romeo snapped, and remembered something that Paris had never, ever wanted to see.

  The next thing Paris knew, he was three paces away from Romeo, his face burning, palms pressing into his temples. He stared at the cobblestones, trying to imagine them lining his head.

  Romeo must have realized what had happened, because he sounded rather strangled when he said, “How—how do we stop it?”

  Paris took a slow, deep breath and didn’t meet his eyes. “Imagine a wall,” he said. “Between us.”

  There was a short, awkward silence as they both tried. Paris didn’t feel any more overflowing thoughts from Romeo, but that might just be because his own wall was so solidly built. He never wanted to feel any of Romeo’s thoughts again.

  He never wanted to look at Romeo again, but he didn’t really have a choice about that. So he raised his head.

  Romeo was slumped against the wall on the opposite side of the alley, and there was such flat despair on his face that Paris would have pitied him, if he didn’t know far too much about what he’d done.

  “Still remember where we’re going?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Romeo muttered. Then he looked up and said stubbornly, “Despise me all you like, but don’t think such things about her.”

  “I don’t,” said Paris. “I despise you for—for seducing her with false promises.” His face went hot all over again as he said the words, but he managed to keep looking at Romeo.

  “Is that what you call a marriage?”

  “It’s what we call a ‘secret’ marriage,” Paris gritted out. “How many other girls did you promise as much and then abandon?”

  Romeo gave him a look of pure disdain. “How many other girls have you enslaved for your family?”

  “Only as many as you’ve killed,” Paris said, and regretted it the instant after. He didn’t know which one of them was feeling this grief, sharp and breathless as a knife between the ribs. Maybe it was both of them: the image of Juliet, smiling unmasked, danced in his mind, but so did the memory of her voice: It’s all I ever wanted, to be correct.

  She was supposed to have lived. They both rightfully should have died so she could live. And instead they had let her die.

  “If you want me dead,” said Romeo, “you can do it. You have the right.”

  Paris shook his head. “Just find this friend of yours,” he said. When Romeo didn’t move, he added, “You do still remember the way, don’t you? To this—”

  “Apothecary,” said Romeo. “He’s an apothecary. He helps the people of the Lower City. He helped us.”

  Paris probably shouldn’t be surprised at any foolish thing Romeo did, but he still said, “You took the Juliet here?”

  The corner of Romeo’s mouth turned up a little. “She liked it.” He turned away and started walking again; Paris barely heard the final words: “She loved the cats.”

  It took them another half hour to reach the apothecary. He lived in a neighborhood where the stone of the buildings had a more golden cast; it did not look rich, but it was a bit less dirty and crowded than some of the spots they had walked through on their way there.

  Romeo pounded on the door. A moment later it swung open, and there stood a short, sharp-nosed man with brown hair turning gray. He wore a tailored shirt and trousers, like a Catresou, but no mask; Paris could see the fine little lines about his green eyes.

  He could see, also, the way the apothecary’s expression moved swiftly from surprise to examination, and then to grim acceptance.

  “My dear boy,” he said gently. “Come inside.”

  At first glance, the apothecary’s front room was a cheerful place: scrupulously clean, with bright-red designs painted on the pale walls. Chests were stacked in the corners, and there was a shelf filled with herb jars. But then Paris looked again, and he realized that the red symbols were Catresou sigils, the kind meant to keep sickness and rats out of a house.

  Dread was a heavy lump in his chest. They were Catresou sigils, but no true Catresou would be living maskless and alone in the Lower City.

  Romeo halted a few steps into the room. “We’re being hunted,” he said. “I can’t—you’ve already done so much. If you don’t want the risk, I won’t blame you.”

  “Her family,” the apothecary said heavily. “What happened?”

  “Who are you?” Paris demanded, wondering if it was too late to drag Romeo out and flee.

  The apothecary looked at him. “My name is Justiran, and yes, I was born a Catresou.”

  Paris had heard of renouncers, of course—everybody knew that sometimes there were Catresou so evil or so weak that they didn’t care about zoura. Who abandoned both their clan and the names that would allow them to walk the Paths of Light. But he had never met anyone who had actually done it.

  “Why did you renounce?” he asked.

  Justiran raised an eyebrow. “Why did you?”

  Paris was excruciatingly aware of his shamefully bare face, but he still met Justiran’s eyes as he said, “I didn’t. I will die a Catresou.”

  “Then I’m sorry you’ve been driven here,” said Justiran. “I know you’ve been raised not to believe it, but I will help you if I can. What happened?”

  “She died,” said Romeo, his voice quiet and desolate. “We went to the sepulcher—”

  “Don’t tell him that!” Paris snapped. “We can’t trust him!”

  It didn’t matter how smoothly Justiran spoke. He was still an enemy.

  “Yes, we can,” Romeo protested. “He helped me and Juliet. He told us to get married!”

  “Then he clearly has no honor,” said Paris. He could feel his heart speeding up. Justiran doubtless wanted to destroy the clan, and the news about Lord Catresou would let him do it.

  Paris should never have come here. He should never have trusted Romeo.

  Romeo’s mouth worked for a moment. Then he looked back at Justiran and said carefully, deliberately, “We went to the sepulcher. We tried to—”

  “I order you not to tell him,” Paris said desperately, and Romeo’s mouth snapped shut. “And leave. We’re leaving.”

  Romeo turned toward the door.

  “Stop,” said Justiran. The next moment he had shoved Paris into the wall, his thumb pressing painfully into his collarbone. “What did you do to him?” he asked, and there was nothing gentle in the way he bit out the quiet, icy words.

  “I—” Paris started to say, and then Justiran’s free hand was tracing a pattern on his forehead with one finger. It was just the barest hint of pressure, but his head suddenly throbbed with a terrible ache. All the strength went out of his legs; a moment later he was on the floor.

  He couldn’t move.

  Magic. And not the kind practiced by the Catresou magi, with its elaborate sigils and formulae. Nor was it the misbegotten magic worked by the Sisters of Thorn, paid for in copious amounts of blood. It was something else, something Paris had never heard of before.

  What if Justiran was the Master Necromancer?

  “Wait!” said Romeo, throwing himself between them. “Don’t hurt him!”

  “A friend of yours?” Justiran’s voice was detached and clipped.

  “No,” said Romeo. “But I’ve seen his heart. He’s a good person.”

  “Do you know he put a compulsion on you?”

  He forced me to, thought Paris, but he couldn’t get the words out.

  “Yes,” said Romeo, “but . . .” His voice grew soft and wondering. “He loved Juliet. I’m sure of it.”

  Romeo was an idiot. Romeo thought nothing mattered besides who had what kind of pretty feelings about Juliet, and he was going to get them both killed by a necromancer.

  Justiran knelt before Paris and looked straight into his eyes. “For Romeo’s sake, I’m trusting you,” he said. Then he pressed three fingertips briefly to Paris’s forehead. Instantly the pain and weakness were gone. Paris sucked in a de
ep breath and scrambled to his feet.

  “I’m a loyal son of the Catresou,” he said desperately. “I will live and die for them. If you want me to renounce, if you want me to help you with necromancy, you had better just kill me now.”

  Maddeningly, Justiran’s grim face cracked into a smile. “I’m not a necromancer, and I would never ask you to renounce.”

  “Then what are you?” Paris demanded. “And what did you just do? Why shouldn’t I run and report you to the City Guard?”

  “You can’t—” Romeo started, but Justiran silenced him with a wave of his hand.

  “I told you,” he said calmly. “My name is Justiran, who was once a Catresou and is no longer. I have read an ancient book or two in my time, and that is all you need to know. And you won’t report me to the City Guard because you are a Catresou still, and trust them no more than I do.”

  Paris wanted to shout that it wasn’t enough, that he couldn’t ever trust Justiran. But he had nowhere else to go. And if Justiran had wanted to do terrible things to him, he already could have.

  “If you mean no harm,” said Justiran, “then you are welcome here. And I will help you.”

  Please, Romeo said into his mind, breaking the silence between them. Please trust him. He will help.

  Paris didn’t trust Romeo’s judgment at all. But he didn’t have another choice.

  “All right,” he said awkwardly.

  Justiran nodded. “So tell me what happened with the Juliet. You two boys were rivals?”

  Paris’s face heated. “Not like that!”

  “Tell me, then,” said Justiran, who was clearly finding this amusing, “just how you did love her.”

  “With honor. I was to be her Guardian.”

  “He swore to serve her,” said Romeo. “I saw it.”

  “How could you—” Paris stopped. Of course he knew how: the bond, and Paris’s own pathetic inability to control it. “She loved zoura,” he said to Justiran. “I wanted to protect her.”

  If the man had ever truly been a Catresou for one instant, he would understand that.