Arc 9: Chapter 9: The Noise |
“Another demon?” Didikas asked. “You are sure?”
We stood outside an inn in the Bow Quarter. It wasn’t far from one of the Ring’s gates, set on the northern corner of a market square. Peddlers hawked their wares in thunderous voices beneath the prickling haze of an overcast day, the second after I’d left the physik lying poisoned on the upper floor of his clinic.
“I am not sure,” I admitted. “It is a predator, I could tell that much, and not human.”
The magician and I stood side by side next to the inn’s entrance, watching the passing crowds. He wore his usual dust-stained robes, and I was clad in a violet tunic long enough to fall past my knees. No veil this time — I decided that walking about the city clad as a figure of power was foolish and unnecessary, the result of my recent successes going to my head.
Didikas hummed and folded his arms. I could not read his expression beneath his heavy hood, but his posture seemed uncharacteristically tense. “There are many demons in this city, both of your own kindred and others. It doesn’t exactly narrow it down. What I don’t understand is why this fiend left poor Dedo alive and in such a state. What message did it intend to deliver? Was it a threat?”
I had no answer for him, nor did I feel like explaining that the paphian’s agony very well could have been the reason all on its own.
Didikas’s cowled gaze shifted to me, and I felt one rust-colored eye burning a hole in the side of my face. Strange, how easily he seemed to know my thoughts, but he was a keen one. None of us knew much about the itinerant magician, other than that he hadn’t been born in Rot Voraag as Arlee, Tej, and Pazé had. He’d had his start as a street performer, hiding his true talents from the Exalted’s servants. He’d never shown his true measure, though I suspected him to have real power.
I spoke his thought for him. “You think I’ve let this become a new obsession.”
“I think nothing,” Didikas said. “I only question. And this other one? The mind-surgeon?”
“What of him?” I asked.
Didikas shrugged. “You should kill him. Who knows what knowledge he inherited from his master? He is a danger to you.”
Though it matched my own thoughts, I still couldn’t stop the mocking giggle that burst from my lips. “Didikas, are you concerned for me?”
He scowled. Before he could answer, the masked and black-clad form of Pazé approached us from the market crowds. She noticed the mage’s expression and raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment.
“What have you found?” The magician asked the cutthroat.
“There’s definitely a new player,” Pazé replied in her hissing lisp, her words muffled by the cloth mask over her ruined mouth. “The Justikars are all talking about it. It’s not just paphians going missing, either. There have been attacks on the cutter gangs too.”
“The cults?” Didikas asked. There were many groups in the city who followed disparate deities — and demons masquerading as deities — and they would often claim their sacrifices from the city’s populace.
“That’s what I thought,” Pazé said, folding her arms and cocking one hip as she spoke. “But I checked in with the Brethren of the Eye, the Nightdaughters, and the Clay Convents. They’ve all lost people as well.”
Didikas’s frown deepened. “How have we not heard of this earlier?”
“You know how this city is,” I reminded him. “Each of the factions are ready to blame everyone else for the mold on their walls, and they’re more likely to draw knives than talk. Things like this have happened before. I’d bet more than half of them assume the Guilds are committing mass kidnappings for some grand experiment.”
“Any reason to think that isn’t what this is?” Pazé asked.
There wouldn’t be, if I hadn’t come across this mysterious scent. I lifted my left hand and bit at my thumbnail, thinking. It was an interesting conundrum. Rot Voraag devoured people every day, and still it remained overcrowded, so even if one saw death and misery all around them, it never seemed to leave a real dent.
But we’d stumbled on signs of something new. There was also what Meshann had told me about the Exalted to consider. Could it be connected? Perhaps scavengers drawn by the dark monarch’s growing power? If he truly was about to undergo apotheosis, it could be destabilizing the barriers between planes. Barriers that were already unstable, following the ruin of the Silver City.
“The most likely assumption is a rampaging Abgrûdai,” I said, masking my inner thoughts. “Probably not a very powerful one, either. If it was anything truly mighty, then either the Exalted himself or the Old Woman in the Well would take issue with it. There has been motion from neither?”
“We would all know it if there were,” Didikas said. “The hag has not been seen on Rot Voraag’s streets in decades. Neither has our king, for that matter. Trust me, Shyora, it would be… obvious.”
“If it’s another demon,” Pazé said with an edge of sadistic glee, “why don’t you just have a chat with them, Shy?”
I gave the pale assassin a withering stare, and she threw her hands up in a shrug. Didikas rubbed at his beard and said, “Well, it’s a puzzle, but I dare say we have greater issues at hand. The Dust King, for one.”
“It has been some time since he took to the streets in person,” I mused. “Then again, he is very angry with me.”
Pazé scowled beneath her mask, the expression betrayed by a shift in the material. “That’s the other thing. It isn’t just Rettabrand. Several other Lodges are also on the move. Just this morning, a cutter gang in the Hallows got wiped out during a territory grab, killed to a head.”
“Who did it?” I asked.
“The Salamanders, from Kilnburg.”
I folded my arms and closed my eyes. “They do assassin work for the Ophidian Sisterhood.”
“Indeed,” Didikas said grimly. “There is something amiss, something that’s bypassed our attention. We will have a better picture of the situation soon. Pazé, what has your brother been doing?”
“I suspect he’s drowning in some gutter,” the rogue said dismissively. “Probably with a whore on either arm and another between his legs.”
Didikas sighed. “Make sure he knows that this is important — have him talk to his fellow fences, see if they’ve heard anything. We may need to call in allies if the Sisterhood and the Dustmen have united against us. Has anyone spoken to Ekasne? I have not seen her since we met at the Candrian’s House.”
That had been well over a week past. We’d all scattered to our individual enterprises after that night of celebration, and Ekasne was packing up her old studio in preparation to move into the Ring. She’d already signed the deed to a house on one of the mesa’s steps, and I had not seen her since before my visit to the Nails.
“I will check on her,” I said. “And you, Didikas?”
The mage considered a moment. “There are beings in the city who will certainly know something, should the right offerings be made. We should consider this an opportunity, I think. It has been too long since the Lodge has engaged with a proper enemy.”
Pazé’s dark eyes gleamed at that, and I knew she was already longing to resharpen her blades. I remained quiet, unsure how to take all of this. It would have excited me not long ago, but after my conversation with Meshann it was hard to focus on petty street conflicts. Rettabrand and Ekasne’s cousins seemed like petty rivals to me after talk of divine war.
“Have you heard about Arlee?” Pazé asked Didikas in a conversational tone.
The mage’s answer was distracted and disinterested. “No. What about her?”
“She has Sythera’s Fever. The physik says it won’t be long.”
“Ah.” Didikas scratched at his wind-scorched cheek. “That’s too bad.”
“Tej will have to find a new favorite,” Pazé said with a muffled snicker behind her mask. “So will half the Bow Quarter. At least I got to have a last go before she became too weak.”
Didikas’s face twisted in disgust. “Pazé, dear, has anyone ever told you that you are capable of far more vulgarity than your brother at his worst?”
He shook his head in disappointment at her crassness, while she merely scoffed and folded her arms. Somewhere in the crowd, there was a shout and blades were drawn, an argument turning to violence.
“Shyora, is something the matter?”
I stared blankly forward, seeing nothing, having only heard their exchange and the commotion in the market as though at a remove. My gaze slowly went to the other two. Both Didikas and Pazé looked back at me, the former with an expression of curiosity and the latter with calculating suspicion. It was Didikas who’d asked the question.
“How long has she been sick?” I asked. “How long does she have?”
Pazé shrugged. “Who knows? The disease comes on slow, but takes you fast. Makes me thankful to be undead.”
Sythera’s Fever was a menace on the city’s sex workers and their customers. Nearly always lethal, no Guild scholar had been able to concoct a cure for the malison. Though older and less explosive in its casualty rate than the Flyscourge, it was in many ways a worse affliction than that demon-borne blight, for it lay dormant for months or years before leading to a slow and painful death. Some said it was no infection at all, but rather a curse laid upon the sinful city by the lover’s goddess with which it shared a name.
I did not fear it for the same reason as Pazé — while spirits and undead can be infested with ailments, they rarely threaten us. I’d infected myself with an Urrson’s plague as a lark, after all.
But Arlee was no true immortal. She’d merely been restitched to resemble one, and had no defense from the city’s poisons.
I revealed none of my inner thoughts on my face. “It’s nothing. She so resembles divinity that I forget that she is as mortal as the rest of you.”
Didikas scoffed. “Of course. Well, you need not worry about that from me — I do not indulge in such low lusts, and Pazé here has already been thoroughly ruined.”
“Careful, juggler.” Pazé pinched the edge of her mask and lowered it, revealing the grinning, stringy ruin of her jaws. “You mock the dead at your peril. All join us one day.”
Didikas only gave the ghoul a grim smile. “Save your tomb faith for a less enlightened soul, dear. I seek immortality, and if I have my way then I shall prove your prophecy false. There is no death — only change.”
“No bickering,” I reminded them. “I will go check on Ekasne. We should all reconvene soon and discuss what we’ve found.”
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They murmured agreements, and I tried not to think about Pazé’s news. Somewhere in the crowd, a man was killed, and a Justikar got involved and started murdering more in their indignant rage. There was so much rage and indignity in this place.
Arlee is sick. Arlee is dying.
Mortals are always dying.
“Ekasne?” I entered the glyptis’s small home without waiting for her to answer the door. I had a key, and she was often lost in her work. It would be just like her to be practicing her art even now, when a better studio waited for her in the upper city.
I did not hear the telltale scraping of her files, or the solid bite of her chisels. The house was silent, dim even with the midday sun burning overhead, but her studio would have better lighting. She would often be there late into the night, working by moonlight. Perhaps she slept?
Intending to wake her, and then perhaps expedite her transition to her new accommodations, I made my way to the back of the house where the glyptis’s workspace lay. The entry had no door, just a drawn curtain. I heard a serpentine hiss and sighed in exasperation.
“Ekasne, do you even know what’s going on out—”
I froze once I’d stepped past the curtain and into the work room. It was dark, all the windows curtained. I was in human guise, so I could only make out the telltale shapes of still forms locked in various poses. The gorgon’s “customers,” those sorrowful souls who’d permitted her to turn them to stone and be improved by her hand. She hadn’t packed them all up, and it was as though I stepped into a strange dance with shadow-shapes frozen in the midst of their revelry.
But that wasn’t what made me freeze. In the very middle of the room stood one figure, still as the rest, tall and slender. They seemed as though they were in the process of turning, their face twisted to the side while their shoulders and legs remained poised another direction, in that moment before a full pivot. Like someone had spoken to them and they were just turning to reply.
That central figure’s hair was a chaos of undulating branches moving in every direction, each lock long enough to spill past the shoulders and ending in a teardrop shape. Snakes, as still as the body.
The hissing did not come from them, but from my left. I remained very still, and did not turn to look in the same direction as the statue.
“Smart girl,” A liquid-smooth voice said from the same direction as the hissing. “Smarter than my cousin.”
“Hello, Karvessa.” My eyes were beginning to adjust to the near-dark of the room, and I kept them fixed on the frozen face of Ekasne. The glyptis’s expression was one of mild surprise, no trace of fear or horror on it. Her snakes were aimed in every direction, as though they’d merely been performing their usual random inspections of the environment. Had the gorgon known of a threat, they would all be facing it.
“Wondering how I took her off guard?” Karvessa asked.
“I am wondering how you froze her without being made stone in turn,” I said calmly. “I have always understood that it leads to mutual destruction.”
The gorgon chuckled. I heard a chair creak — she was sitting down near the wall. “Come now, Shyora, we’ve known one another long enough not to play games. You don’t reveal your tricks, I don’t reveal mine.”
She was gloating. It didn’t matter, I could guess what happened. Karvessa had entered the room through diplomacy, not force. They had been in the middle of a conversation when the sculptor was murdered. It was evident by her pose, by the passive demeanor of her hair, that look of mild surprise frozen to her face.
Ekasne had always been overly trusting, even of her own duplicitous relatives. But why hadn’t the other gorgon also been petrified? Once eye contact was made, the curse should have taken hold at once for both. Mutual destruction.
“And what did your cousin do to deserve this?” I asked, still keeping my gaze fixed firmly forward. All I had to do was flick my eyes to the left, and she could slay me. I felt her staring even then, almost thought I could feel an uncomfortable chill on the side of my face.
“Don’t play the fool with me,” Karvessa drawled. “I allowed Ekasne’s little farce because it did not infringe on my business.” Once more the chair creaked as the gorgon leaned forward. “The stunt you pulled at the Exalted’s court does infringe on my business. I have contacts in the Akropolis, and heard about what you did that day before you’d even left the upper city. You had to know there would be a price for insulting me.”
I scoffed. “Your kin finding their own success insults you?”
The gorgon hissed, and her living hair hissed along with her, forming a chorus of serpentine rage. “Ekasne was a sniveling, sentimental trollop. I know she had no ambition other than what you slithered into her ear. One day you’re selling her art — if that’s what you want to call it — to the court. The next day, every accursed blueblood in the city won’t buy my product because the packaging it comes in isn’t smooth enough.”
My lip twitched into a smile. It had been my intent to cause problems for Karvessa’s business — not the whole goal, but a pleasant side effect. “So, it is about ego. Afraid that poor, timid Ekasne was going to upstage you? It’s too late, Karvessa. She already did. The court was practically fawning over her that day.”
“And now she is stone.”
The slaver stood then. I tensed and lowered my eyes, feeling a spike of indignant rage with the action. Keeping myself from looking directly at the gorgon meant lowering my head, taking on the posture of a subordinate, of a lesser. I knew there was no recourse, that being prideful would only make it easier for her to kill me, but it galled with a fervor I had not expected.
Karvessa laughed quietly, and I knew she hadn’t missed the same thing I’d realized. She moved to stand next to the petrified form of Ekasne, and through my lowered eyelashes I watched her raise an arm to stroke the statue’s arm.
I longed to taste her blood, but caution stayed my rage. Immortal does not mean invincible. Normally, the shock of having my physical vessel slain would repel my spirit from the mortal coil. Exposed and weakened, I would be dragged back to the Abyss that made me, pulled by the same inedible powers laid down with Creation’s very stones into the hungry maw that waited for all my kind.
But the gorgon offered an even worse fate, perhaps — to trap my essence in a stone prison. How long would I be unable to move, unable to feel anything but the inner walls of my own petrified ‘corse? It was not a fate I wished to rush into.
“Such a shame.” Karvessa ran a hand along Ekasne’s toned shoulder. “She should have taken my offer and joined my enterprise. It’s so inefficient, doing most of the work by myself. The quality and quantity of stock should have equilibrium, don’t you think so?”
She seemed to consider a while, so the only sound in the room was her living hair slithering and hissing. I risked glancing up, just for a brief moment, and saw that the slave lord wore something over her deadly eyes. They were a pair of lens’s, tinted a dark amber hue and secured to her face by wire frames.
“I think I’ll sell her to one of the caravan prince’s,” Karvessa mused. “Or maybe a Skârdian chieftain? They trade in ivory, you know. Quite valuable. I’ll have to remove my poor cousin’s eyes, of course, but she’ll make for an exotic plaything. I hear she’s been letting an outworlder barbarian pound her, so I doubt she’ll notice a difference…”
She lifted her hand and paused, as though a new thought had just struck her. “Of course, I could always sell her back to you. The price will be astronomical.”
I knew what came next. Karvessa had no intention of unfreezing the glyptis and selling her off. She was merely meandering to her point, pulling taut the thread of tension until the precise moment she meant to snap it. I knew what her next action would be, because it was the very thing I would have done were our positions reversed.
She would smash the statue. No reanimation for Ekasne, no leverage held or ransom taken. I knew exactly what she wanted me to say, like lines memorized in a well-loved play. This was the part where I should bargain, make some concession to keep my ally, swear never to cross the slaver again.
It wouldn’t work, of course — she would kill her cousin anyway — but I should still try. She might even pretend to indulge.
Karvessa knew this game well, and played it expertly. While hers might be a low cunning, she’d done this countless times before, and she knew me by reputation — knew I played the same game she did, followed the same rules.
This was her mistake. I’d said it so many times before; that I was no devil, no wicked angel bound by inedible law. I played these games of power because I appreciated their aesthetics and found them entertaining. This was what Deacon could not understand even though he understood me better than most.
While I could comprehend rationality and appreciate the nuances of a bargain, within me there lay a chasm of madness. That pit had no bottom.
Karvessa’s words faded in my hearing, became little more than stale air as I studied Ekasne’s inhuman face. Handsome more than pretty, with its defined jaw and sharp cheekbones, her inhumanly lithe figure tall and athletic. I’d rarely been able to look at her so plainly, for every time we spoke she wore veils.
I’d envied her for years. I’d been jealous of her talent for art, of her steady wisdom, the peace she seemed to bring upon those who sought her curse. I’d studied her, even learned to mimic some of her manner. Often I’d believed she would make a fine succubus, with her talent for putting her victims at ease before claiming their flesh and souls for her own.
But she possessed something I had not at first understood. In the past, I believed I understood mortals inside and out — after all, I knew exactly how to plunge a blade into the heart and twist, how to sow desires and reap regrets. Yet Ekasne, in her own way a monster, had compelled fearful humans to open up to her, to trust her, all without hiding her fangs.
And I’d realized something else after a time. None of it was a lie. None of it was a manipulation. That realization astounded me. With those baleful eyes she kept covered, the glyptis seemed to see so much. Yet she did not see the city as a great feast as I did, or as a ladder to some fashion of enlightenment like Didikas, nor as the brutal jungle the twins thrived in. She lived in the Exalted’s shadow because only there was she not hunted and forced to live in isolation.
Fell, who was nearly half demon himself, had become entranced by her. I’d been jealous of that, too. Not because I’d coveted the warrior for his own sake, but because something about what they shared called to me. Just as faint and distant fires had once drawn me out from the darkness in which I was spawned.
How often had I mocked them in my secret thoughts? How many times did I wonder when one of them would slay the other, either through accident or pique? I’d lost count of the myriad ways I’d considered causing that fracture myself during my voyeuristic observations, impatient for what I assumed to be inevitable.
Now that match was broken, ended not because of one or the other’s flaws, but because of the capriciousness of an outsider who did not even share my fascination. I felt cheated, and with it a fast-rising indignation at this dawning reality, and only in that feeling realized how invested I’d truly been in the affair.
I’m worried about you, Arlee had told me. Ekasne is too.
A lie. They were all scared of me. They treated me like one of their own because they perceived my playacting and sought to prolong it by their own seeming indulgence. But it was a pleasant lie, at least, and one that suited my own intentions.
But lies are tedious things, and I’d grown bored of them. It was in that moment, looking at the sculptor’s gray and frozen face, that I realized I hadn’t just come here to give her the Lodge’s news. I wanted to talk to her. To tell her of my misgivings and discover if gentle, insightful Ekasne could tell me why I felt so stung. I wanted her to tell me, in that same motherly way she calmed her customers before allowing them to look under her veil, why I could not get those words out of my head.
You didn’t do as much damage to us as you might think.
He just went to a higher place.
Arlee is sick. The physik says it won’t be long.
“Well?” Karvessa asked with an edge of impatience. “What do you say? A good deal, isn’t it?”
Perhaps, but I hadn’t heard a word of it. I did not care.
The game wasn’t fun anymore.
“Why are you laughing?” Karvessa demanded in a furious voice.
Was I? Ah, I was! Small, broken giggles escaped my lips, ones I might have covered with my wings had they been exposed. Instead I covered my mouth with the palm of one hand, trying to stop that burst of mirth. I couldn’t, nor could I muster the self control to tell the enraged gorgon that I wasn’t laughing because of humor. I did not find this situation funny at all.
I was Shyora. This ugly little city did not take from me. I took from it. Small playthings like Karvessa did not poach my toys, they did not interrupt my diversions.
She said something else, but I did not hear it over the maelstrom of thoughts tumbling behind my unfocused eyes.
Arlee is not sick she is not dying I was not done with her was not done with Ekasne we were going to rule the city together I had a plan a strategy a purpose we are not done not done it is not finished they can’t leave now can’t die now can never die can’t leave me in the quiet again it’s not fair not fair not
Weak little mortals why are they so fragile why must I do it all myself damn them damn it damn damn damn to Hell damn Pazé she is a liar she lied I will rip out her guts for it the rotted little whore how dare she lie to me
Is it her fault did she do this I’ll kill her eat her wear her skin don’t want to be alone—
“Control yourself, you crazed wretch!” Karvessa’s hiss finally broke through the noise in my head. Though her eyes remained hidden behind those amber glasses, her expression was twisted in disappointment. She shook her head sadly and said, “I had hoped you were different. The old one said you were, she insisted you would help us… But you’re just another mad demon, aren’t you?”
Yes. Yes, yes, yes! I was that, wasn’t I? I thought I’d escaped it, but I carried it within me, just as that rancid son of Urr said. He was the one with the last laugh, after all.
I slid my hand across my face to cover my eyes. They were damp with tears. How had I forgotten it? For ten years I’d distracted myself with blood, plots, and excitement, indulged in curiosity and mortal pleasures. But it waited there beneath the noise of my diversions, always and forever.
An abyss.
Karvessa had reminded me what waited once this brief vacation was over. She’d spoiled my good mood, and for that crime I would never forgive her. For all the ageless eons I would exist, for every moment of my eternities beginning from this atom of time and through forever, even beyond the memory of why, I would hate.
“Look at me, Shyora.”
There was compulsion in the gorgon’s voice. She was powerful — had I not been lost in my own raving thoughts then, and had she used more than that fragment of my true name, I might have taken my hand from my eyes and met her gaze. Likely, she’d already removed those slivers of crystal from her own, in preparation to finish this business and grant me Ekasne’s own fate. She was so fixated on me that she did not see my shadow expanding across the room, would not notice its bristling shape stretching out over the walls.
No matter. If I could not drown out my torment with companionable conversation, then I would do it with her screams.
