The Shopping Expedition, xi.
Posted: Fri Apr 05, 2024 7:32 pm
The Past
Galeas was waiting in their room at the hotel.
"Time to pack," he said, and Oren tried to find the man called Ostry behind the pale blue eyes and the red-tinged tan mask. He thought of Dett back in Cathena. Confidence men of a certain kind tended to submerge their identities, he knew. But Dett had his vices, lovers. Even, it was rumored, children. The blankness he found in Galeas was something else, new. There had been feeling before. If he hadn't ever loved his spawn, he had been proud of certain of Oren's childhood endeavors. Hot and cold, though, and eventually, Oren had pushed the envelope too far, and the repercussions had seemed out of proportion, and then there was no hot, only frozen cold.
And now this. Galeas was his father, but he sure wasn't his dad. Had he ever been, or had Galeas just been the mask that the remains of Ostry wore? He didn't know if it was age, his new, barely controlled runic tricks, or the strange job they were working, but he could finally see the mask. He felt a mortal terror at what might lay behind it.
"Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the street. "What kind of climate?"
"They don't have climate," Galeas corrected. "Just weather. Here." He set a card down upon the marble coffee table, then stood.
"Did Len'Falas check out all right? Where's the Pherg?"
"Len'Falas is fine. The Phergus is on his way home." Galeas smiled, a smile that reminded Oren of the antennae of some insect twitching more than a true expression of human emotion. He shivered, but it might have been the drugs. Galeas' gold bracelet tinkled as he reached out to poke Oren between the eyes. It hurt more than it should have, definitely because of the drugs this time, and made him feel suddenly nauseated as though it were some magical migraine. "Don't get too smart. Those little presents inside you, the protections are wearing thin, but you don't know how much."
Oren forced his face to remain still as he gave a nod.
When Galeas was gone, he picked up the postcard. It was expensively printed on a thin slice of finely sanded cedarwood, and painted with the Hytori dancing pigment, runeforged or alchemically treated or something such that the pigment moved subtly when observed. It gave the work a sort of unique, fresh, and alive feel to it. But it made Oren's nausea worse.
Why wait? it asked. Feeling his stomach rebel, he tossed it aside and hurried to the commode to wretch.
*~*~*
The four of them were booked on an airship to Aur'arnis. Pupils dilated, Oren watched the great portal open in the sky. He was sweating on the deck of the thing despite the cool air its wards permitted to reach the passengers choosing to remain above. His eyes were weeping, though he was frozen, taking in what was happening through the filter of his new arcane senses.
He vomited over the taffrail when they passed through, his senses warping the experience into a nightmare trip. He knew it wasn't real, though. At least, he knew what was happening and wasn't lost in some delusion, but he couldn't turn it off. He couldn't persuade his inner ears that the polished boards beneath his boots were stable, that he hadn't just traversed a hole punched through reality.
They were over the sea then, he could smell the salt tang in the air, though it remained a comfortable temperature, at least for those not teetering through threshold sickness and medicines intended to mitigate it, which really only sometimes worked, and sometimes, he thought, made it all worse. And he was surrounded by liars and murderers. Of course, he always had been. But now, sometimes, they seemed to be monsters. Or he could see them more for what they were, the beauty of it stripped away. He was not ready to deal with Ambal Len'Falas.
Oren did not see the beauty of Vallanar, the City of Stained Glass and capital of Aktí, as it glittered on the shore. They were overland and over Aurisian land by the time he felt himself enough to go below.
Later still, in Aur'arnis, Oren sat in the lobby of another hotel and watched Len'Falas browse clever recreations of Aurisian artifacts in the glass-walled gift shop. Galeas, his coat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
Len'Falas was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his Common accentless and fluid. Ava said he was sixty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age with Raella's grace. She also said his citizenship in Sol'Valen had been revoked, and that he had managed to elude the Hytori authorities. She said he was what happened to elves who lived too near the northern border of Sol'Valen and inhaled bad air from the Clockwork Wastes passing over the relatively short distance of Dwarven Hold States and into their xenophobic utopia. Oren called bullshit, but kept it to himself. The high elves would certainly know how to protect their lands from distant corruption. They were magic and shit.
Three smiling Kalzasern tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Galeas. Galeas crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Len'Falas. Len'Falas turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Oren assumed the features were the work of a Hytori carver. A subtle job, nothing like Galeas' blandly handsome face, which looked nothing like the original Ostry. Len'Falas' forehead was high and smooth, grey eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Oren watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Len'Falas didn't act like a man who had been attacked the night before, drugged, abducted, subjected to the Phergus' examination, and pressured by Galeas into joining their team.
Oren checked the fancy clock. Ava was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Len'Falas again. "I bet you're stoned right now, asshole," he said to the lobby. A gray-faced Siltori matron in a tailored, white leather coat lowered her spectacles to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarillos for the next leg of the journey. "You will I see later in date, honored mother," he said in broken Silandris to the woman, who promptly slid her spectacles back up the bridge of her nose and turned her gaze back to her book.
There were cigarillos in the gift shop, but it was a fancy tobacconist and he didn't fancy talking with Galeas or Len'Falas. He left the lobby, left the hotel, and walked down the street, past huge, perfectly clear glass panes with humanoid sculptures decked out in fashion. They were advertisements, not gods. His hand fumbled in secret pockets where he kept gold coins, letting pickpockets ogle the belt pouch that only contained copper.
He heard faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling through the air, and then a sound like wind. Assuming it was another hallucination, he ignored it.
Hello, Oren.
A silver coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight.
Douma, Oren. 'Tis time we spoke.
His eye caught movement in one of the windows and he nearly tripped, a two-dimensional shape of vaguely humanoid proportions attempting to resolve into something. He wanted to put his fist through the glass.
Don't you wish to speak, Oren?
Addiction forgotten, he turned on his heel and walked back toward the hotel entrance. On his way back, he had to walk the city block of huge glass panes. In each one, the figure appeared, and even in his peripheral vision, he could see it resolving into something he didn't want to see. In the last one, he saw Douma waving as he passed.
The Present
In darkness, he splashed cool water against his face. It stung. Blinking, he peered at his freshly shaved face in the looking-glass. The light was stark, colorless. He liked to see himself without affectation, to see himself clearly. He was pale since the Eclipse, and now there wasn't much difference between the skin on his face and the skin on his ass. He was a pink thing like this, pink and pale, and even his ginger hair was less exciting, less appealing in this light. He didn't look starved anymore, but despite the myriad of scars, he felt like whatever healthy weight he had put on was excess, made him soft.
It was strange, though: the people he fucked these days would have wanted him to fuck them even if he was balding with a beer belly. And anyway, few could see through his illusions. He wondered if he was subtle as that deranged fucking elf, but he supposed he would never know. That one had been a monster.
This one was a monster too. If he took any consolation, it was in that he was like an evil dragon from fairy tales, protecting his hoard. While his hoard did include gold, he had grown to value the people more than that. The gold was a means to an end, just potential energy manifest in minted metal.
There were still demons in the looking-glass, though. They were just him.
Hazel eyes reflected back, trying to stare himself down, trying to figure out just how he was going to figure out which of Douma's little bastards had his claws in Rivin's soul. While Sivan had intervened, drawn him out and trapped him somewhat, he had warned Aurin that it wasn't a permanent solution.
The way his past came back to haunt him was never the way he had initially feared it would. The past was never really finished with him, though. It never would be.