Alexandria (30 page)

“Mmm,” says Hilen, “this is what you want to think. Probably nothing is out there. Probably they are all dead.”

“Yeah,” says Tryna, “I think that’s right. Dead. And from something… terrible.”

“It must’ve been if it made them never talk again,” Jack marvels.

“Sickness?”

“Maybe sickness. Or something like happened to you two,” Hilen says. “Maybe they had found a good place, and other people decided they would take it from them. That’s what happens, isn’t it?” He looks at Jack.
“Isn’t it?”

“I… it happens. Yes.”

“Yes,”
Hilen repeats, feeling vindicated of his theories.

“Whatever it is, it’s gone. If it was good, it doesn’t matter, because we never knew it,” Jinn says despondently. “And we just walk. One place to another. We always move. We don’t settle.”

“We don’t get attached.”

“Hold nothing, they say.”

“Ah yeah. Hold nothing with you.”

“When we got out here, close to the water, I think they were hoping for… hoping to find what they lost. Another good place,” Kas explains. “And they haven’t found it and now they’re sad all the time and they pretend not to be, and they don’t want to tell us why because they don’t want to scare us. But I can tell. Like I said, they
mean
good.”

The others nod in agreement.

The strange liquors they drank seem to amplify every sorrowful statement and Jack feels a comfort of sorts—relief to know they are not alone in running. He reaches an arm out for Lia and she folds herself into his side. Kas watches, and Jack watches her watch.

“You are lovers,” she says. Jack’s face flushes with hot embarrassment and he says nothing. “Were you told to be together?”

“No. No one told us,” says Lia, thinking back on the arranged Temple life that was almost her destiny. “Why? Do they tell you?”

“Yes,” Kas says simply. “In a way. They tell us who we can mate with. We have to keep the blood mixed around.”

“What blood?”

“Family blood.”

“Why?”

“Or else it goes sour,” says Jinn, “and the children don’t grow right.”

“Oh.”

“Of course,” says Kas, her gaze touching back on Jack, “new blood would fix that.” He gets that hot feeling again, like his ears are on fire. He’s not well acquainted with the business of childbearing, but he knows what she is driving at. Jinn watches dully, not seeming to mind her advances in the least. “Do you have children together?”

“Huh? No,” says Jack. “We… we don’t.”

Lia looks up at him glassily, then rolls her eyes toward Kas.

“That’s sad,” says Kas, “you’d have pretty children.”

“Thank you,” Lia says firmly.

“Mmm,” she says, and the moment stretches out clumsily.

“Are you tired?” Tryna asks, saving them. “We can go back, if you want.”

“Yeah, we should sleep. We have to leave early.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. We should leave before dawn anyway.”

They wander back the way they came and Jinn and Hilen prop up a little tent and gather some furs.

“You can use this,” Hilen says. “Do you need anything else?”

“Thank you, no, this is good. Everything is very kind.”

“Good,” says Kas. “And if it storms tomorrow, you can stay here if you want, I don’t care what they say.”

“We’ll be fine.”

Outside the wind screeches and drives hard rain onto the veranda. They climb into their tent in the corner of the front chamber and huddle together.

“They’re nice,” Lia says, “but they’re so
strange.”

She curls against him, shivering, and he wraps his arms around her. As he lies there, the tent and the whole world beyond it seem to swirl around him, pulsating to the beat of his own heart, and just as he starts to fall backwards into a dizzying sleep, Lia speaks.

“You think it’s true, don’t you? I mean, I know there’s something there, but… do you really think it’s that place you heard stories about?”

“Hunh?”

“Alexandria.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Me too.”

Chapter Twelve

A blue eye.

It stares, distorted, from the polished glass. Arana leans closer, his wine-rankened breath fogging the surface and tinting the orb with a milky haze. It speaks nothing to him, offers no condolences, reveals no hint of any cosmic significance. It stares coldly back from the other side of the mirror, blasphemous.

Outside his parlor, the Temple sleeps—only the creaking echo of sentries on their rounds, the static of crashing waves, low murmurs from the corridor—all else is silence. He withdrew here early in the evening, his absence palpable in the Temple Hall. He imagines them whispering about him—he wonders if they quietly suspect that he is an impostor.

He narrows his eyelids down to slits and focuses solely on the little black pupil at the center of that mocking blue halo. He strains again to conjure the endless worlds that were promised him, and the lies of his father ricochet through his addled mind, the great and lofty bestowals—the cruel mixture of sincerities and deceptions.

Arana takes the glass in his hands and hurls it across the length of his parlor. It shatters against a portrait of himself, standing valiantly at the head of the reflecting pool, the Temple rising above him like some gaudy behemoth. Broken shards tinkle to the floor and the frame tilts askew. He walks to it and faces himself. Beams of light descend upon him from the churning skies, highlighting his features with a golden spirit glow. He pulls it from the wall and breaks the frame over his knee and extracts the stiffened canvas and rips it again and again, rending it to tattered shreds.

He takes the pieces and cants drunkenly toward his fireplace, steadying himself on one of the high-backed lounge chairs, and throws them into the flames. The mismatched collage of his own image catches afire and turns to fluffy white ash, the pieces curling in upon themselves. He sits and watches it burn, a sheen of perspiration on his hardened face and two small reflections of fire sparkling in the middle of those dark, bitter pupils, consuming a likeness of the very face that beholds it.

When the canvas is all but cinder, he rises and staggers to the door. The sentries startle when he bursts into the corridor.

Arana makes for the balcony and the men attending him hustle to keep up their escort. He acknowledges none of them, his mind consumed of only one thought—
more effective methods
. His arrhythmic footsteps reverberate through the empty Temple passageways, through the foyer, and finally to the sunken landing that spirals down to the underground keep. The guard unit stationed at the bottom watches him descend, perplexed looks falling over them. He stops in front of the barred wooden door that conceals the keep.

“Open it.”

The sentries do as they are bidden, lifting the bar and pushing the door open to the dismal interior. A tiny sconce fights off pitch-blackness. New courses of stonework lay drying in the back shadows, the tiers standing over waist high. Small, dark shapes race along the walls. It smells of decomposition. The man guarding Renning snaps awake and stands nervously at attention when his leader enters.

“Give me your knife,” says Arana. An instant of hesitation passes and the man offers it forward. Arana wraps his fingers around the hilt. “Get out.” They start back ever so gradually, riveted by their King’s every movement.
“Get out!”
he screams, trembling. They collect in the antechamber and watch. He paces over and slams the door, then turns to face his prisoners.

Renning hangs slack, his shoulders straining against the weight of his body. He does not stir. A short distance away, curled on the floor like a sleeping dog, lays the boy. His lip quivers. His slow, doleful countenance looks up at Arana, a glint of sorrowful hope in his sluggish eyes.

Arana squares himself in front of Renning. “Wake up.” He belts him across the jaw.

“Ungh…”

“Tell me your secrets.” He hits him again. “I know you can hear me. Tell me who you are.” He hits him again. “Tell me where you’re from.” Again.
“Tell me.”

“A city…” says Renning, “to the north.”

“Lies.”

“A hundred miles… it’s there.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m nobody.”

“Why are you here?”

“I heard… such wonderful things about you.”

Arana throws an elbow into his teeth, scattering the few he has left out onto the floor. “Stop lying. Tell me. What do you know?”

“More than you ever will.”

Arana takes the knife and pulls the boy up by his hair. He squeals when the knife touches his throat.

“Put him down—”

“Tell me or he dies.”

Renning looks at the boy. A small droplet of blood slides down the knife’s blade and falls to the floor. The boy looks up in anguish. Renning tries to lift himself and his weak body gives out.

“Kill me.”

“I will not.”

“Please.”

Arana curves the blade in deeper and blood flows freely.

“Please,” he says again, tears coursing down his cheeks.

“Where are you from?”

“South.”

“Where south?”

“Please, please kill me.”

“Where south?” He pulls the boy closer and tightens his grip.

“It’s… it’s… a hundred miles…”

“You’re lying.”

Arana commits the act, quick and businesslike, and lets the body fall from his arms. It twitches on the ground in the final convulsions of death. Renning screams. Arana backs away and looks at what he has done, staring in terrified astonishment like a boy who’s just stumbled across his first carcass in the woods. His maddened eyes are spread so wide the entire circlets of blue are visible. He wipes the blade clean on Renning’s torn shirt and tucks it back in his belt.

“Tomorrow I’ll send for another one,” he says shakily. “We have lots of children.”

The heavy ashen cloud cover breaks apart and bright neon pink shines through the cracks. They stumble out of their tent and sit rubbing their eyes on the rain-soaked veranda, twigs and soggy clumps of leaves strewn about from the deluge.

“We slept too long.”

“Good,” says Lia.

She wanders alone down the garden path, stretching her arms above her head and yawning wide. Jack leads Balazir outside and ties him up by a patch of tall grass, then returns to collect their things. The matriarch peers around the gallery entrance and startles when Jack sees her. He gives a respectful nod and goes about his business.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she says as she approaches.

“Thank you. It was good of you to let us stay.”

She gives the slightest of acknowledgements. Her mouth seems incapable of smiling. “It wasn’t my idea. These people that hunt you, are they many?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anywhere that is safe?”

“No.” It is the answer she was expecting. “But you have to leave the coast. There must be someplace out there.”

“There are places. We passed settlements. We were afraid to approach them.”

“Why?”

“We were afraid they would see us as enemies. That they would kill us. We have something in common, you and I.”

“We do?”

“I was raised in a wonderful place. By the best people I’ve ever known. And I watched it all vanish before my eyes.”

“What happened?”

“It's gone. That's all I care to say.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Maybe you can make a good place of your own, someday.”

“I’ve been trying for thirty years. Here,” she says, and hands him a satchel of fruit. “It’s not much.”

“Thank you.”

She looks in him intensely, then turns and walks back down the long gallery to begin preparations for her clan’s departure. Jack weaves between the tents and steps back out to where Balazir stands, absently chewing a mouthful of grass. He unties him and climbs in the saddle, then ambles down to get Lia.

“Look,” she says.
“H-E-L-P
. See?”

The word is spelled out across the downslope that drops away from the mansion. The stones that form the letters are sunken halfway down into the earth, with a netting of yellowed weeds covering them—they have been laid out as such since before Kas and her friends ever arrived here.

“I wonder if they ever got it,” he says, and pulls Lia up behind him. He touches the reins and Balazir steps carefully off the mossy patio and trudges across the enormous stone E and moves on down the hill.

“It looks like they wrote it for people in the sky to see.”

“Maybe they did.”

The burgeoning sunlight steams the rainwater out of the drenched earth and makes the air heavy and damp. Jack pushes the horse as fast as he can on the soft ground and they start to find their course again.

“Can you look at the map?” he asks. Lia digs around and pulls it out. “See that road we were on?”

“I think so.”

He scoots sideways and points to a crooked line that stretches down the length of the long shoreline.

“How come their map is so good?”

“They must’ve wandered around a lot.”

“That road goes all the way south.”

“Yeah, it looks like it does.”

“We’re going to follow it?”

“We’re going to stay close to it. I don’t want to go right on it, though.”