The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Page 17

  “Thank you,” said the chatelaine, brushing herself off. She had spoken loudly and promptly to preempt any comments that might be made about her, if the women had not seen her asleep on the bed. They turned to watch her now before returning to their tasks. The chatelaine considered leaving her chambers so the servants would not see that she really had nothing to do, no tasks at this time of day, but instead she got up and lingered over by her cages, feeding her remaining pets pieces of dried bread from a basket she kept filled for such occasions.

  She wondered how Octavia’s second encounter with the fecund had played out. By now, the girl had surely made her way from the kitchens to feed the creature prerequisite scraps. Each day Octavia would need to repeat this: the fecund, when pregnant, ate voraciously.

  Each day, the monster would change.

  Suddenly overcome by a mad urge to see her kholic lover again—who might possibly be the only person in existence ever to understand the chatelaine, she said, “You there, women by the fires.”

  Both staff turned once more.

  “I’m afraid I have forgotten your names.”

  “Georgia,” said one.

  “Thea,” said the other.

  “Fine. Please fetch Lorichus when you are done, Georgia and, er, Thea, was it? I wish to get dressed.”

  “Yes.”

  The fire stoked, beginning to crackle, the two servants left. Shortly after, Lorichus arrived. The chatelaine commanded Lorichus to fetch her blue surcoat, the one with the yellow fur lining, and to find her green leggings. She believed this outfit to be her most flattering. Lorichus did as she was told and then helped the chatelaine get dressed, pulling on the hose while the chatelaine sat on the edge of the bed, attaching the garters, getting her feet into the slippers. Finally the servant arranged the chatelaine’s long hair so it was piled precariously atop her head.

  “A special visitor?”

  She searched the woman’s round red face for traces of irony or sarcasm but Lorichus, who was fussing with the pins in her hair, seemed sincere enough. “Of course, I have the quotidian assembly with Erricus, but for now I am going out.”

  Perhaps recalling a previous outing, one that had ended rather unpleasantly, Lorichus paused, eyebrow lifted. “Outside of Jesthe?”

  “No, no,” the chatelaine replied. Her answer evidently caused the servant more confusion, though the woman asked nothing further.

  At last satisfied with the hair, Lorichus rubbed sheep fat onto the chatelaine’s cheeks but, growing impatient, the chatelaine dismissed her servant with a wave of both hands.

  From the other side of the room, her fire roared.

  Moments later, the chatelaine strode the Great Hall, surcoat billowing.

  Without assistance, though he lay groaning, reaching out, even calling for help, path’s father finally managed to get to his feet. Feeling very tiny in this place, and quite ill, he came slowly to understand that his son was no longer around. The sling, still around his neck, was not only empty but the frame had been smashed when he’d fallen and was useless. In more ways than one, he felt lighter. Could it truly be that path was gone? He looked all around: dozens of people, going about their cryptic business in this city, but no sign of the boy.

  Then, for these crowds of citizens and for Nowy Solum, he felt a quick rush of giddy gratitude. He almost exclaimed with the surprising joy that burst inside him. His eyes watered. Though the journey had nearly killed him, the destination had taken away his burden as soon as they had entered the front gates. There was no more strange presence, no more fear of what his son was becoming, no more pressure.

  He took a deep breath, filling his lungs to capacity for the first time in ages. Under a dark archway, he removed the sling from around his neck and let it drop to the street.

  Without path, well . . . he might even linger here, in Nowy Solum. For a little while. And, if he ever felt that his boy was nearby, why, he could just steer clear. There was room enough here for both of them. That is, if path was even still alive.

  He searched inside himself to see if this morbid thought left residues of remorse, but it did not.

  He was free.

  Had not a massive man leaned over path, as path rolled into the gutter? If this man had taken his son, and the spirit that had entered path continued to transform him, then the big stranger would need the best of luck.

  “Viti,” he said, which was the name of path’s father, the name he had been born with. No one had spoken it aloud, not since his wife’s death. He smiled. His name had invigorated his tongue and palette. His name echoed off the walls and faded down the streets. He said it again, louder, feeling as though he were waking from a deep sleep. The giant could keep his damned son! Helpless and demanding, the rotten boy had killed his own mother, draining her day by day. Path was the reason she had gone mad, the reason she did the things she did with the men who passed through. Death for his wife had been a merciful release.

  Shame she hadn’t lived to be here now, with viti, in the big city! All the fights, the arguments: these had been path’s doing, the pressure of having a child like him for a son—

  Grinning again, viti took a step forward, not caring which direction he went, for each direction held unknown futures and unlimited possibilities, but as he put his foot down he heard a loud crack from above and someone screamed. The last thing viti did was glance up before the briefest flash of discomfort was followed by an eternity of grey static.

  Nahid came awake, familiar pains throughout, dim light driving into his eyes, still very much under the ill-effects of his melancholy, which had been surging inside of late. At first, he assumed it morning, and that his memory and body suffered not only from the curse in his veins but from a compound of too many buds and ales. His vision was blurred, his head pounding, his nose excruciating.

  He was outside, in an alley.

  Had there been a fight?

  Half-sitting, with his back against a mossy wall, he discovered that more than just his face was sore: most of his body, in fact, when he tried to move, ached. His head must have hit the soft brick behind him because his skull felt like it had split in two. Something had bruised his chest and shoulders.

  There had been a fight.

  With a gang? Had he battled a hundred officers of the palatinate?

  Daytime. Not morning at all. The faint sounds of people from a nearby street, but there were no people here, nor windows in the adjacent walls. The alley itself was hardly wide enough for him to stretch out both arms, if he could move them—a dead end.

  Then he realized where he was. He used this route as part of a shortcut to scale the roof and then descend on the other side of the row of tiny houses, to get to the Gardens of Jesthe: he was just off Endicott’s Alley, verging the centrum.

  He had been about to visit Octavia.

  He remembered waiting, then, outside Jesthe, to see her, and the guards—

  Nahid tried to get to his feet but the pain in his limbs was fierce. He shifted his shoulders and legs to ensure his spine was intact. There had already been morning today. During the night, he had entered Jesthe with Name of the Sun, released the cherub, gotten dumped at Hakim’s place.

  And had been smashed backwards against the wall.

  Nahid propped himself up on one elbow, though his body continued to protest, and the throbbing in his head so intense it threatened to make him pass out. Whatever had crashed into him lay still, in a heap, at the end of the alley. He saw a hand, part of a thin leg. To Nahid, trying to understand what he was looking at, it appeared as if a small, skinny teen had been stuffed into a black sack of some sort—with arms and legs poking out—and then wrapped in a large, shiny blanket before being thrown with considerable force at the wall.

  Forcing himself into a crouching position and moving forward, Nahid put one hand on the crumpled heap—which felt very warm—and began to lift the thick material aside, searching for a face within. The sensation against his fingers was like none he had felt befor
e: the odd covering was warm and thin, yet pliant as hide. It was also sticky with fluids, but whether this fluid was red or black or something else altogether Nahid could not be sure. His fingers became stained and clammy. In the dim light from the lanterns on the street, he saw the face, sunken and pinched. On the forehead, above a smashed mask (that Nahid thought might be tattooed there, until he felt it), was a grave wound. Very few teeth in the open mouth, and the few that were there were stained brown and worn down to the gum line. The stench of the man was like ripe refuse. Under the mask, the yellow eyes were half-open but rolled back, showing neither pupil nor iris.

  The man was alive.

  For an instant, like a fool, Nahid looked up at the low clouds, as if there might be more of these seraphim descending.

  Nothing.

  Smooth metal rods and cryptic pieces of hardware that flickered tiny lights at him caused inexplicable bulges Nahid could not fully access. With his knees pressed up against the unconscious man’s chest, he did manage to find—tucked into a pocket—an object roughly the shape and size of a child’s forearm. As he touched this gently, a chill made his body shudder. His pains ebbed.

  Drawing in his breath, Nahid withdrew the artifact, icy cold, but quickly getting warm as his own flesh. The surface was impossibly smooth. He rubbed the device with his thumb and distant voices started to whisper in his head. A woman, speaking a different language? A child?

  He turned the treasure around and the whispering ceased. On the sides, tiny engravings—writing of some sort—scrolled like marching insects. The letters glowed dimly. Thin white filaments extended as he watched, poking feebly against his wrist, tapping there, as if trying to get in.

  Should he leave the body here, slink back to the ostracon as if nothing happened, to sleep and recover?

  But there were poisons in everyone, spirits in their veins. . . .

  His plan had been to kill the chatelaine.

  The woman’s voice resumed, like a wind blowing through him.

  He squatted over the broken creature for some time, until it began to moan. Then he slid the object into the waist of his shorts. As the whispering grew louder still, Nahid managed to stand.

  Name of the Sun had hoped to sleep, for she had a shift in the evening at The Cross-Eyed Traveller, but she was already convinced she would not be able to function at work, nap or no nap. She had bitten her nails to the quick.

  Her room was small and damp, seldom empty during the late afternoon. Most often her roommates were there—Dora, Nina, and Polly—drinking beer, shrieking with laughter. Or the landlord dropped by. Sometimes all four were cramped into the tiny space when Name of the Sun came home. The landlord was always smiling, always nodding, affable, always trying to get any of the girls to sleep with him in exchange for rent. The other three had ofttimes taken him up on his offer.

  When Nahid had come back to the room with her, and everyone was crammed in there, the situation had been awkward, to say the least. Her and the kholic could barely even fit inside, let alone have privacy. But the party would inevitably break up shortly after she pulled Nahid in, looking down at the floor, sitting in a corner, not saying anything. The expressions, the gaffes, the exchanged looks and awkward silences: these had been priceless.

  Now the girls must have been at a pub. Quietly, quickly, Name of the Sun unfastened her robe, eager to sleep—or to try—before her roommates tumbled in.

  Had Nahid, she wondered—pulling her blouse up over her head—cast a spell over her? Were there traces of his affliction in the semen she had let spill across her stomach or had even swallowed? What could possibly cause the kholic to exert such influence over her? Name of the Sun sincerely wanted to stay away from the kholic, though images of his body, lying on the mattress with her in this very room, and memories of him holding her while she slept, and the feel of his grimy body pressed against her—the thrill of looking into his eyes, against that black mask—flickered relentlessly through her mind.

  Only when she found herself thinking that maybe she should give him another chance—that it was true, what he said, she could never relate to his pain, being neither a twin nor a kholic—did Name of the Sun actually laugh out loud and bitterly force herself to imagine something, anything, else.

  She brushed at her mattress to rid it of fleas as best she could. Once under her sheet, she idly began to masturbate, as she often did when she was tired and needed to sleep, but her wrist soon became sore and she recognized that the effort to come would be too great, so she lay still, unsuccessfully managing to keep her mind from dwelling on the reasons for the demise of her recent relationship, and why they seemed to make such little sense now.

  The closest Name of the Sun came to being distracted was when she wondered, for a little while, about Nahid’s twin sister. Though Name of the Sun had never met the girl, she would very much like to: Octavia could attract a woman such as the chatelaine and could cause Nahid such anguish. Nahid often said that Octavia looked just like him. In which case, Name of the Sun understood the pull that the sister might have; she must have been gorgeous.

  Later, still awake, though she might have slept for a moment, Name of the Sun began ruminating about Nahid’s list—his three objectives: fighting, getting high, and fucking—leaving her hand where it was, immobile on her damp mons, all arousal long-vanished.

  There came a scratching at the door. She lay, alert again, listening to the patterns of sounds: not as if someone were trying to get in, but as if an animal, maybe, were digging, or some other resident of the city, sharpening claws on the wood.

  Silently, she got of bed. Holding the sheet up, she called out softly.

  The scratching stopped.

  And began again.

  Taking a deep breath, and another, Name of the Sun unbolted the door with shaking fingers, yanking it open—

  The stoop was empty. She looked up the street. Down. There were people in the fog, old buildings. Wet stone and crumbling brick and the scents of the humid evening.

  Nothing unusual—

  Except two cognosci, racing into the crowd on all fours.

  Naturally, hornblower had been more than a little reluctant to step inside Anu’s mouth. He did not really want to even look in there. But the angry sky power had waited, inert, gaping at branch level, while hornblower stood trembling among the dead bodies of his fellows. Wind sang in the branches and the sun got stronger. Ambassadors buzzed around. Finally, when he did not move, two sinuous fingers—very much in appearance like the common green snakes served at most feasts—extended from the bottom of Anu’s chin, moving slowly but with dread certainly and, under the ambassador’s guidance, took hornblower solidly around the waist; hornblower either had to hop forward into Anu’s throat or fall off the edge of the great limb and discover what was really under the clouds, like Pan Renik had done.

  Only without wings.

  He chose to hop forward, landing on a surface flatter and harder than he had imagined.

  Anu bobbed with his weight.

  The power was large, and clean, extending back farther than hornblower thought possible, with rows of small yellow lights either side and room for a dozen people, at least. He focused on what could only be a seat, and to this he clung. The material he gripped was soft, certainly not carved from the meat of the world or woven from her leaves. When hornblower risked a quick glance about, he knew that Anu was made of unfamiliar materials. Polymers, the teachings said, but the word seemed pale and hollow in the face of these marvels. Most of the yellow lights he had seen when he first jumped inside appeared now to be writing, and this writing floated in the air. Tiny figures danced and shimmered. Hornblower held onto the chair as if nothing could ever pry him out of it again.

  Outside the mouth, he saw the array of dead padres, sprawled on the branch. Red sap ran in rivulets from their ears and noses. Their faces were contorted with final agony. So easily had Anu killed them all. Every padre had been wiped out with a thought or quiet word. Except for him. Hor
nblower choked back fear for his own future, wanting to cry out, to shout questions, but knowing he’d best remain silent unless he wanted to end up like his brethren.

  Farther along the branch, peeking from their huts, several members of the settlement watched. He saw the two girls he had planned on visiting after the funeral standing agog before their hut, and he wondered if they would try to help him. Should he call out to them? But this might also anger Anu, so he merely nodded, to reassure the girls, and gave them a desperate wave: they retreated from sight.

  Perhaps the people believed that Anu had called for him, and had devoured his body because he was devout, the best padre ever, the only padre to achieve this miraculous honour—

  With a quiet whir, Anu’s mouth closed.

  His view of the settlement was cut off.

  Dimmer inside now, but the intensity of the yellow lights rose, and images crackled and spun, flickering strange characters at him, passing right through him. He tried to touch them as they swirled but could not.

  Careful not to hyperventilate, hornblower pushed farther back into the seat. He wanted to vomit as the sky power began to sway, expecting to be chewed any second by hidden teeth, or digested by a flood of stomach enzymes.

  When nothing like this occurred, he risked longer looks around. A series of odd noises, accompanied by the occasional distant voice, crackled through the short wall at his knees, though this voice spoke in words he could not understand, and as if from a terrible distance.

  The smell in the power was like the sky right before clouds got dark.

  Rocking back and forth, waiting for any clues, trying to be humble and devout but not sure what to do with his hands, hornblower came to the conclusion that he really could not make his situation much worse. Cautiously, slowly, he began to explore. Mere visuals at first, staring with growing awe at the treasures. Someone such as himself, though nevertheless a padre—a powerful padre at that—was surely not meant to understand or perhaps even lay eyes on such incredible wonders.