The Past
The sky was lightening into predawn gray as Oren left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn't sleep. He was sick of his lodging. Their contact with the gang that had aided them in the heist had gone, then Galeas, and Ava was being attended to by healers. There was a vibration under his feet as a train hissed past. There were shouts somewhere in the distance, too far to trouble him.
He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new jacket, flicking the first in a chain of cigarillos into the gutter and then lighting another. He tried to imagine Galeas' necromantic insurance policies inside him, his time running out even as he walked. It didn't seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he had seen through Ava's eyes while his spirit had been tied to her so he could report from within the target. He found himself trying to remember the faces of the three people he had killed back in Cathena City. The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Jamila. A battered cart bounced past him, empty vessels rattling in its bed.
Nothing seemed real anymore, between the tricks he had been tricked into and the steady diet of ghostwine.
"Oren."
He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.
"Message for you, Oren." Wolfsanker appeared, changing colors with the masquerade trick in ways Oren hadn't mastered yet. Their contact. "Pardon. Not to startle you."
Oren straightened up, hands in his pockets. He was a head taller than the masquer. "You ought to be careful, Wolf boy."
"This is the message: Douma." He spelled it out.
"From you?" Oren took a step forward.
"No," Wolfsanker said. "For you."
"Who from?"
"Douma," Wolfsanker repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of hair. It was a pink too bright to be anything but illusion. His entire form went matte black, a smudge of coal against the old wall. He did a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There. He was exactly the right shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes winked back the light from a streetlamp, and then he was really gone.
Oren closed his eyes, massaging them with numb fingers, leaning back against the brickwork.
Cathena City had been a lot simpler.
*~*~*
Oren met Ava when she emerged from the healer's clinic. She was limping.
"He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
"I ran into one of your friends," he said.
"Yeah? Which one?"
"Wolfsanker. Had a message." He passed her a paper with Douma printed in neat, laborious capitals. "He said—" But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
"Get us some food."
After lunch, Ava dissecting her meal with surgical ease, they moved around the city. Oren had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her and she rarely spoke.
A thin black child with wooden beads woven tightly into her hair opened the Phergus' door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Oren felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch.
Beyond the blanket, the Phergus waited at the white table.
Ava began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Phergus. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Oren didn't know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the funt of his jacket. A glass jar of picked fish stood on the table beside a torn package of biscuits and a tin ashtray piled with spent cigarillos.
"Wait," he said, and left the room.
Ava took his place, producing a blade from her person, and speared a grayish slab of fish. Oren wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering accumulated gear on the other furniture along the walls. Ten minutes passed at the Phergus returned, bustling along and showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Ava a wink, and gestured to Oren to help him with the door panel to seal the warding.
"Honeylamb," he said to Ava, tucking something away, "you have got it. No shit. I can smell it. You want to tell me where you got it?"
"Wolfsanker," Ava said, shoving the fish and biscuits aside. "I did a deal on the side."
"Smart," the Phergus said. "It's a demon."
"Slow it down a little," Oren said.
"That's all just fine," Ava said, "but where does it get us?"
"If Wolfsanker is right," the Phergus said, "this demon is backing Galeas."
"I paid to have them nose around Galeas a little," she explained, turning to Oren. "They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they'd get my money if they answered one question: who's running Galeas?"
"And you think it's this demon? Aren't they stuck on another... plane or whatever...?"
"Sit down," the Phergus said, sitting down himself and hunching forward. "Have I got a story for you."
"Pherg," Ava said. "He loves a story."
"Never told anyone this story before," the Phergus began.
The Present
"I don't know how this works," he admitted. "I made an offering before I came in."
Aurin was not in his element and he was not charming. This was his first time in the high temple of Kalzasi; he had never been a religious man and even meeting a demigod hadn't put the fear of the Gods into him. In fact, he had made a contract with the demigod, terms and conditions, a way to have some sort of control in a situation that had him far out of his depth. He was similarly out of his depth now, going out on a limb for an employee.
The seeress—he knew her gender by reputation and assumed her race to be Orkhan, though it was difficult to say through her voluminous robes and bronze mask—was silent and impassive, kneeling in the cloister. The room was too hot, braziers keeping her old bones warm. The light was a bit hypnotic, hundreds of candles flickering. The air was redolent with incense, a strange musk roiling out of various censors. He supposed it was all quite mystical, so esoteric, but he wanted solid answers to forthright questions.
"So I met this Lysanrin kid down below the Midden while investigating... Anyway, turns out he's an orphan. I'm trying to help him out. He's independent so I give him work that lets him support himself. Helps me out too—it isn't charity or anything. I'm no saint. But ah... he wants to know what happened to his parents. Doesn't remember them, really, just a lullaby his mother sang to him. It's not a lot to go on, so I made no promises except that I would look into it. I'm good at ferreting out secrets normally. I've tried to make some connections in the Lysanrin community such as it is... I've sung the song for an ethnomusicology—I think that's the word—expert at the Pyrecaeon. I could sing it for you... I don't know how your gift works. They say it's foresight, but I thought you might be able to look back, as well.
"I don't imagine there's anything happy to tell him, but I promised."
He was a bad man, but he did have his own code of honor and conduct that he tried to live by. He fell silent.
She remained quiet.
It was awkward.
"All right, well," he said diffidently after some time. "I tried. Sorry for wasting your time."
Aurin stood up and turned to go. By the door, he bent to put his shoes back on. He glanced back at her, but the seeress remained still as statuary. With a sigh, he turned toward the door.
"Oren Cavafy," came an eerie voice, hollow and metallic. "Seeker of the Mad King. Seeker of the Wing Thieves. Seeker of lost things. If the boy wishes answers, bring him here to sing the song of his people."
It took a minute to unknot the solid wall of tension that had become his body at the sound of his birth name. He hadn't heard it in years, had almost managed to forget it existed, he existed. If Yshvold did decide to return with him, he would have to introduce himself as Aurin Kavafis and hope the seeress would play along. It was more than a new identity to him, it was a new personhood. He didn't want to return to the person he had been. He didn't want to dig up those old bones.
"Yeah," he managed, a husky whisper. "Yeah, all right."
