The Past
He was numb as they were looked over by the guards at the entrance to Freeport, and Ava did most of the talking. Caelum remained behind on their transportation. The guards seemed primarily concerned with proving they carried gold, jewels, or other salable goods; the people ahead of them wore finery, were known by the guards, and apparently had proven themselves and were allowed in on 'credit.' The first thing he saw once they were past the gates was a fine café.
"Welcome to the Avenue of Explorers," Ava said. "If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch if you're not used to it."
Of course, being told to look at his feet, he looked straight up instead and instantly regretted it.
They were standing on a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The light here was filtered through fresh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun...
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them, too bright, and the bluest sky he had ever seen. But they were somewhere in the Aetheric Sea, on a different plane—whatever that meant—from Cathena, the sun, and anything he was familiar with. His new senses punched through the glamours once he concentrated, and then he wished he hadn't. They were gentle, pleasant things, the lies being told to their senses.
Caelum's colony was slapdash, but had the sort of familiar comfort as might a rabbit warren for rabbits. This place embraced the chaos, and that chaos ran subtly through each fiber of it, and into the people as well. He could see it all... No, his knees were giving out, and Ava was shoving him up against a wall, smiling like nothing was going on. He had no chill; people might stare, might know they didn't belong.
If the fake sky wasn't there, he would see, impossibly, a similar sight as a bird might looking down at him. This little world was a lie. Gravity was a lie. He could sense the reality of the place, but it made no sense to his body.
"Vhexur's balls," he muttered, wondering if he was going to sick up, "I like this less than..."
"Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month."
"I want to go somewhere... lie down..."
"Fine. I've got our keys." She touched his shoulder. "What happened to you back there, man? You were dead." It wasn't exactly maternal concern from the woman who was, technically, his mother. It was almost as strange as the fact that they were spinning like clothes in a laundry spinner, not walking on the ground because of the everyday magic that the Dragon Gods and Mistlords intended.
He shook his head. "I dunno. Yet. Wait."
"Fine. We'll get a ride or something." She took his hand and led him across Explorers, past a window displaying fashionable Kalzasern furs. There was something off about them, and when she had to pull too hard on him, she stopped, looked, explained.
"Oh. Perhaps because they aren't trapped, skinned, and sewn together in Kalzasi? Your new senses smell trouble? They have a necromancer grows... ah... well, brings 'em back to half-life to keep growing furs. Easier to feed half-living mink aether out here than import or maintain all that... What does it matter? Come on."
Even life was a lie here.
*~*~*
"It's like a big bingo cage and they pour people into it," Ava was saying, trying to explain to him how Freeport worked. He knew. His new trick told him; it just made him woozy at first and now it made him want to stick his head in the ground like one of those fabled ostriches. Ignore it and it wasn't real. "Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's a fine mesh catching all the money as the people get tossed and turned and fall out..."
Galeas had booked them into a hotel. One wall of the room he shared with Ava was glass, as if they were temporarily living in the side of a cliff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Oren went out on the balcony and watched a trio of Gelerian teenagers ride simple gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of brightly painted sailcloth. One of them swung, banked, and Oren caught a a flash of cropped dark hair, dark breasts, and white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers; thankfully, he had managed to push his new senses away and could enjoy the lie for the moment.
"Yeah," he muttered as Ava joined him, "a lot of money."
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed. "Yeah. We were going to come here once, either here or some place fancy..."
"We who?" he asked, surprised at a single statement coming out of her mouth that just felt honest.
"Nobody," she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. "You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep."
"Yeah," Oren said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. "Yeah, this is some place." The Oren of a few weeks ago would have been out trying to charm or otherwise maneuver someone into giving him something intoxicating and a warm, moist place to hide his cock. Now, he just wanted to sleep. He felt fucking awful.
The narrow band of 'sky' smoldered in an abstract imitation of some sunset over the Crystal Sea, striped by shreds of cloud.
"Yeah," he said, "sleep."
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like neatly edited segments of memory, like he was living inside a shard of memory stone. He woke repeatedly, Ava curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped rooms on the opposite slope. Edain's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself it hadn't been Edie—that it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average body of human or elf was roughly the same as a case of beer.
Each time the image of Edain's shattered skull struck the rear wall of his office, Oren was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away from his grasp, diving like an eel, just out of reach.
Jamila.
Edain. Blood on the wall of his office.
Jamila. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of Cathena's underground. Ava holding out a bag of ginger, the bag dripping blood. Edain had had her killed.
Douma. He imagined a demonic caricature perched upon the shoulder of that wreck of a man named Ostry, whispering poison like a river of sickly green words, the flat personality of Galeas being constructed out of what remained of the man who would have been Oren's father. Would Ostry have loved me? Whatever was left of him dimming into Douma's tool; the Edain-faced apparition of the demon had said it worked with given circumstances, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Edain, the real Edie, had ordered Jamila killed on Douma's orders? Oren groped in the dark for a cigarillo and Ava's lucifers. There was no reason to suspect the old elf, he told himself, lighting up. No reason
No reason?
Douma could build the shape of a person into a shell and fill it with its own motives and agendas. How subtle a form could manipulation take? he wondered. He stubbed the cigarillo out in a bedside ashtray after his third drag, rolled away from Ava, and tried to sleep.
The dream—memory?—unreeled with the monotony of a child's rainy day. He had spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a flat he could rent by the week, fourth floor, with a girl called Marle. The wooden stairs were rickety. Roaches boiled across the graying porcelain in the tiny kitchen if one disturbed their domain. He slept with Marle on a mattress without sheets.
Young Oren had missed the first wasp when it built its paper fine gray house on the blistering paint of the window frame, but soon the next was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below, buzzing angrily among the rotting garbage.
They had polished off three bottles of wine the afternoon a wasp stung Marle. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room. "Burn 'em." Drunk, Oren rummaged in a sour-smelling closet for Rolloun's little dragon Rolloun was Marle's previous—and, Oren suspected at the time, still occasional—boyfriend, an enormous cavalryman who had apparently fucked things up in Atinaw and was now a mercenary thug in Cathena, with dumb designs bleached into the shaved side of his dumb blond hair. The little dragon was a magic wand from Atinaw; it just made fire. It didn't always work, so he banged it a few times until the red glass gem in the side slowly blinked alight like a sleeping eye waking. Oren went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air above the sluggish river was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Oren's head. Oren flipped the red glass open on its hinge to reveal a chip of pyrolyth, depressed it with his thumb for the count of three, and then released a fifteen-foot tongue of pale fire. The nest charred, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
"Fuck!" Marle behind him, swaying. "Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!" Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her hair sizzling a special green for the weird concoctions she put in it to bleach away the pretty auburn into a cheap-looking blond.
In the alley, dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the packed dirt. He saw the horror that the gray paper had concealed: a spiral of stepped terraces of hatching cells, the blind jaws of unborn things flexing ceaselessly, the progress from egg to larva to near-wasp to wasp. In his mind's eye, each one froze like a detailed illustration in a naturalist's notebook or a druid's grimoire. It was hideous in its perfection. Alien, though it was entirely natural.
Oren pointed the dragon at it, forgetting to key it, like a child holding his talisman out in the dark between him and the monster emerging from the closet. Nothing happened as he pointed at the bulging, writhing, dying, suffering life at his feet.
When he did key it properly, it exploded with a thump, taking an eyebrow with it. Four floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marle laughing.
Oren woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages burned into his vision. The sky outside hinted at the start of a false, false dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water down below. He didn't know if the water was real or not. He didn't know anything anymore. He wished he could get high.
In the dream, just before he had drenched the nest with faux dragonfire, he had seen the Archebold coat of arms neatly embossed into its side as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
The Past
Aurin pointed at the nest.
He couldn't call fire, though; the flames were illusory. The bees were confused, but not killed.
"Aurin?"
The flames were a lie. Aurin was a lie.
"Aurin..." A warm, gentle, strong hand touched his shoulder, turned him around. He didn't know who he expected to see, but it wasn't Sivan. He didn't know where he was for a moment, then realized it was the valley.
He was safe being drunk and—fuck—near naked in the valley. He shivered. It was spring, but even if Sivan's pet gritaeri kept it a bit warmer than outside the valley, this was Karnor, not Cathena.
"Sorry, bees..." He knew the bees were descended from the nest that lived in Sivan's enchanted garden.
Sivan's arm was around him, guiding him back toward Torin's house. His mind couldn't penetrate Sivan's without a struggle, but he got the sense that Sivan, the mindful, kind fuck, was weaving him back on a path where nobody would see him so he wouldn't have to feel embarrassed when he was sober. It made him want to cry, which made him angry. He didn't cry.
Once in the house, he shrugged Sivan off, put his hands on the elf and pushed him against the wall. Stumbling a little to his knees, he fumbled at Sivan's trews.
"Aurin..."
"Let me do this..." his voice slurred a little. If he swallowed the elf, he wouldn't owe him for his kindness. It made sense in his head; he didn't have to articulate it. He just had to hold the elf to the wall and get him in his mouth. Then he was sure Sivan would acquiesce.
"Aurin..." He sounded pained, not aroused.
"Siv, shut the fuck up." A sound jerked his head around. It was Huntress; the wolf-dog was judging him. "Oh, fuck off, Huntress..."
When his throat was stretching and breathing was impossible, there was a strange clarity even amid the blur of the booze. If Douma created Galeas and Galeas created him, one could argue that Oren and even Aurin were both the product of a demon with a plan and nothing else. Then his suffering had no meaning.
Sivan gasped, and Aurin felt his hand tender on his cheek. Aurin's eyes were closed so none of this was real, especially the thumb swiping a tear aside.