Midnight on the Avenue of Explorers, ii.
Posted: Wed May 22, 2024 3:22 pm
The Past
When they had strung up the ropes, according to some complex scheme of Ava's, they hung them with battered sheets of canvas. As they worked, Oren gradually became aware of the music that constantly played through the colony. It was worship, Ava said, and a sense of community. Oren heaved at one of the canvas sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Utopia smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and burning intoxicants.
"Good," Galeas said, gliding loose-kneed across the wards and nodding at the maze of sheets. Len'Falas followed, less certain in the gravitational shift from air taxi in the Aetherial Sea to the warded and otherwise magicked colony.
"Where were you when it needed doing?" Oren asked Len'Falas. The elf opened his mouth to speak, and a fish swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Oren's cheek.
"Taking a shit," Len'Falas said, and smiled.
Oren laughed.
"Good," Len'Falas said, "you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled; four arms, four hands.
"Just the harmless clown, right, Len'Falas?" Ava stepped between them.
"Hey," Caelum said, "you want to come with me, man."
"It's your equipment," Galeas said, "and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay."
"You're very pale, man," Caelum said as they were shifting everything from the belly of the taxi across the wards and into a central corridor of the colony. "Perhaps you want to eat something?"
Oren's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head no.
*~*~*
Galeas announced a three-day stay in Utopia. Ava and Oren would practice in the strange lack of gravity, he said, and grow accustomed to working in it. He would brief them on Freeport and Luminaria. It was unclear what Len'Falas was supposed to be doing, but Oren didn't feel like asking. A few hours after their arrival, Galeas had sent him into the canvas maze to call the elf out for a meal. He had found him curled up like a cat on a thin mat, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white shapes and symbols. "Hey, Len'Falas." The ring continued to revolve. He had gone back and told Galeas. "He is high," Ava said, not looking up from the disassembled parts of her miniature crossbow. "Leave him be."
Galeas seemed to think the lack of gravity would affect Oren's ability to use his new tricks, to act while drunk on ghostwine. "Don't sweat it," Oren argued. "When I've had enough of that stuff, I won't be here. It's all the same."
"Not to your body," he said. "According to the Mystic, you will not have had enough time for the threshold sickness to wear off, let alone while ghostwalking. You are going to have to learn to work with it."
"So... I'll be working out of our palace of silk veils?" he asked, indicating their canvas-walled base of operations.
"No. Practice, Oren. Now. Outside the wards..."
*~*~*
Everything looked fucked. With his seeing trick turned on and a belly full of ghostwine, there seemed to be no particular relationship between where his mind was and where his body was.
"How are you doing, Dec?"
"I'm dead, Oren. Got enough time thinking... remembering... to figure that one."
"How does it feel?"
"It doesn't."
"Does that... bother you?"
"What bothers me is that nothing does."
"How's that?"
"Had a friend in the Aurisian camp. His thumb was frostbit. Chirurgeons came by and they cut it off. A month later, he was tossing and turning all night. Karol, I said, the fuck's wrong with you? Mistborn thumb's itching, he says. So I told him, scratch it. Decimo, he says, it's the other mistborn thumb." When the soul gem laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Oren's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that, Dec?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you destroy this mistsdamned thing."
*~*~*
Oren didn't understand the Utopians.
Caelum, with no particular provocation, related a yarn about a fish who had burst from his forehead and swam into a forest of their homegrown drugs. "Little fishie, man, no longer than your finger." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of olive forehead and smiled. At first, Oren figured it was Len'Falas pulling the same trick on Caelum.
"It's the drugs," Ava said, when he told her the story. "They grow your pig weed, do some alchemy on it. They don't make much difference between states of mind, you know? Caelum tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, but more like..." She smiled. "Poetry. Get it?"
Oren nodded dubiously. The Utopians were always touching him when they were talking, hands on his shoulder. He didn't like that.
"Hey, Caelum," Oren called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run outside the wards. "Come here, man. I want to show you this thing."
Caelum swung nimbly down in a tumble. His bare feet struck an iron girder, etched with mystical symbols that apparently held the wards in place. He caught hold of it and peered through the wards at Oren. He blinked mildly and grinned. The ghostwine was beginning to hit him, and Oren held up his fingers before Caelum's face. He was going to try to show him what he was seeing. The Utopian closed his eyes and Oren touched his forehead, and tried to channel what he was seeing, sensing, into the other man's mind.
Caelum instantly shuddered and Oren pulled his hand back.
"What did you see?"
"Demons," he said, then kicked back up the girder to where he had been working.
The Present
"Who are you?" he asked, staring at Rivin's sleeping body.
The intelligence that had stared out of Rivin's eyes at him all that time ago, that hadn't been Douma. So who was it? Which infernal creature working for or with Douma, or trying to work one over on Douma, had tricked the young mutt into binding their souls together? Siv didn't know. He didn't truck with demons, and Aurin could respect that. The sly fox was just glad the elf had him somewhat contained, and it seemed he didn't have all of his memories or he would be more effectively fucking with Aurin.
Perhaps he ought to take Rivin to Zaichaer with him, call in favors with the Kindred or even the Grymalka, or do them favors in exchange for their expertise. He supposed sending them Sivan had earned him more brownie points, and he had let certain people know that Kala Leukos was an able necromancer with sympathies for the Zaichaeri in general and likely the covens in particular. Even if he didn't want to know more about necromancy than he had learned while drunk on ghostwine, he knew he wanted the Grymalka to owe him favors.
And it wouldn't hurt for the witches to see how well he was training Rivin, that he was someone to be reckoned with. If he could pull all the covens under his thumb the way he had with the Whispers, well, that was an entire network of people who could do quite a lot for him.
He needed to work on the Sunsingers, too. Imogen was off doing whatever it was she did other than protect the covens, and he wondered if they would need protection from Dreyfus Monteliyet.
Aurin considered the naked body limned in moonlight from the high windows, too high for peeping Toms. He looked a bit like a demon, though in the watery light, everything was a bit blue. Rivin didn't usually want to stay and cuddle; Aurin suspected he used Sivan for that, which made sense. Aurin had Torin for that, as well, but he supposed he might as well stay, too tired to taunt Torin with the smell of another on his skin and demand he prove himself attractive enough to maintain Aurin's attention.
Little cruelties had their time and place. With a weary sigh, he relaxed his arm, let his forearm hit the pillow and rested his head. Rivin's hair smelled strange, though it had become familiar. His arm wrapped around his slender apprentice, his leg too claiming him.
"...we will figure it out..." he murmured as he fell asleep.
He dreamed of demons, those from the past and those in the present. He knew they existed. He knew their cruelties surpassed his own. Aurin was hardly an angel, but even a bad man had his limits.