The Hidden Twin (5 page)

Well, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch.

Saltball Street is lively for a weekend. It shimmers with smiling couples carrying bright umbrellas, haughty ladies with haughty parakeets perched on their arms, and grim laborers grasping their toolboxes with scabby fingers. Tall stritch birds, their stubby wings and long necks draped in vibrant linen, carry their riders and cargo in long strides, leaving behind the occasional cloud-soft feather, a puff of yellow sunshine on the gray cobblestones.

I am vigilant, watching for robes of a vibrant blue—to most, the color of virtue, but to me, only danger. Luckily, I see no priests. The crowds will protect me today, I hope. Holy brothers and sisters wouldn't attack an unarmed girl in the middle of the street, would they?

I swallow.
Would they?

The city leans and I head up, dragging my fingers along the gritty bricks of the buildings that hug the street—a good tenement house, a grocery, the hissing corner of a long factory. The cobblestones slope away into sunlit, ashy mist so bright, it makes me squint to look ahead.

I can see the outside world through the glass of the Dome, but it has been years since I've actually walked Caldaras City in full daylight without Papa's dark goggles on. The city without shadows, without tinted glass dulling its colors and edges, is thrilling. A middle-aged couple greets me with quick, warm smiles. Two young boys carrying paper bags rush around me, one on each side, like I am a tree in a river. I don't know which excites me more, being acknowledged as though I were any common person, or being ignored for the same reason.

High Ra Square is one of the highest points in the city, where the oldest and most beautiful buildings stand against the cloudy backdrop of Lake Azure Wave. Jey and I know it well from our perch on the rusty aviary, but I have never walked the wide flagstones. It is more open space than I am used to. My nerves prickle.

The flat, white expanse—a marvel in this sloping city of ash and coal dust—is lorded over by the massive Temple of Rasus, an ancient structure whose features are dimmed by the bright fog behind it. To my squinting eyes, it is a great bull's head in silhouette, curved horns jutting into the bleak sky—a colossal creature that could swallow the entire mass of people swirling around the square in the late morning heat.

Someone bumps my arm, and I'm lost in the new, strange feeling of being jostled. There are so many human connections here! Shoulders and elbows sliding across me, children bouncing off my legs, long hair brushing my face, replacing the scents of smoke and poison with those of flowers and soap. I just want to stop and stand in the middle of High Ra Square and revel in all these sensations.

I am excitingly conspicuous in the middle of this sea of clean-swept flagstones and undulating crowds. So many eyes—the opaque goggles of furnace workers and high society, the naked eyes of everyone else. Some have brown eyes like my sister.

Yet my eyes are blue. Wrong.
It is not unusual to have blue eyes,
I tell myself, but I lower my lids, searching for a more secluded vantage point. I could linger in the shadows of the giant obsidian redwing that watches the square, just for a moment. A normal girl on her way to leave an offering at the Temple. A girl who
is.

A stritch's bony hip knocks me solidly, and I stagger a couple paces before tripping over the hem of my duster. My knees hit the marble flagstones hard. They throb as I scramble to get upright again. A hand finds my elbow and steadies me. An elderly man with kind eyes nods and pats my arm before moving away. Other people pause in a brief moment of concern, their gazes tracing me up and down.

“Oh, I'm so sorry, young lady,” comes a voice from above. An elegant woman atop the stritch leans down. “Are you all right?”

I struggle to find my voice. “Yes, thank you.”

Now the square is too much. The white stone, the daylight, the mist, and especially all those eyes, taking me in, giving me substance—it is all too much.

I scuttle across the square, brushing in and out and around, to the long, deep shadows of the Temple of Rasus. I place my palm flat against the towering redwing statue as though the gesture will steady me, tether me away from the throng. The smooth stone is cool and so is its shadow. I breathe.

Here and there, the lesser priests with lowered eyes and vibrant blue robes push wide brooms, sweeping ash and dust from the marble slabs into gutters. Papa has told me they do this all day long to keep the square miraculously white, always. I think of Bet-Nef's frothing bones at the bottom of Lake Azure Wave, their otherworldly scorch the miracle that keeps the water boiling. No one really sees the black volcano that cradles the lake in its fiery stomach. No one really sees the blue lesser priests and their wide brooms here in High Ra Square. They see only white bones and white marble.

One of the priests shuffles toward me. People clear a respectful path for her broom and the dark, dancing granules before it. The priest does not look at me, or at anything except the end of her broom, but she moves closer and closer to my shadowy harbor. My body tenses. Is she hiding a pistol under her robes? Has she been sent for me? I press my back against the stone, veins pulsing.

Then she turns, swish-swishing in a gentle arc, and cuts a path back toward the gutter on the far side.

I exhale, tingling. In the middle of the square, the priest's course bows outward, hugging the curved edge of an elaborately carved fountain. At its center, Dal Roet, the hero of the War of the Burning Land, stares serenely over the colorful masses of people, a helmet under his muscular arm, one bare marble foot perched atop the spiked shield of his enemy. He gleams even in this diffused sunlight, a brilliant contrast to the massive black stone redwing at my back.

I step out from the base of the redwing and look up. I can see the obsidian priests now, half the size of the main figure, stretching their hands up almost as high as his winged shoulders. Odd, to have a creature so hated and feared guarding the very door to the Temple. But he gives me a strange comfort. Whatever the mythology, here is a redwing out in the open in High Ra Square, where everyone can take a good look at him. Part of Caldaras City. Part of society.

My gaze lingers. Take away the teeth and the protruding eyes, and this redwing is handsome, not monstrous. File down the claws on his hands and feet, and he could almost be an Other. He is half Other, after all. What would he say, this giant stone prince, if he could address the crowds of High Ra Square?

Would he know me?

“It is only stone, Beloved.”

A voice jolts me back. A man in white is looking at me. He leans on a luminous dark walking stick that spirals into the air above his white hair. His eyes are pale and sunken into his gaunt face. Several lesser priests hover around him, their eyes everywhere, their posture submissive.

My voice sticks in my throat. I know who this man is. How impossible that he is here now, talking to me on my day of freedom—the second most important priest in all of Caldaras after His Holiness the Salt Throne. This man could, with a word, send countless people to their destinies or their graves.

The Onyx Staff.

People nod or bow as they pass us. I bow, too, not knowing what the protocol is. Papa has never told me how to address high priests, only to stay away from them.

“Your Benevolence,” I croak, remembering the dialogue from a funeral scene in one of Jey's novels.

“The statue troubles you, Beloved.” The Onyx Staff gestures to the great stone redwing. “But we keep that primeval monster at our door to show we are not afraid of it. That is all.”

Be normal. Be normal. What is normal?
The Onyx Staff looks into my eyes, and even though I know he has no reason to recognize Jey in me, I feel the rawness of everything that is wrong.

“Yes, Your Benevolence,” I say. “Thank you.”

I wonder, suddenly nauseated, if the bonescorch has marked me in some way. But the Onyx Staff only nods and says, “Breathe easy, Beloved.” He turns with his entourage and they disappear up the marble steps into the Temple.

I slink back into the shadows, farther in this time, until my back rests against the Temple wall behind the redwing statue. The thud of my heart in my ears, the sound of my own fear, blocks out the hum of the square.

Was that a close call? Close to what? I feel as mythological as the ancient statue in front of me. Surely the primeval monster the Onyx Staff spoke of has nothing to do with me and my tatty duster.

I remember the purple face of the priest I struck down in the alley. Compelled, I look up again, and my stomach lurches. I am behind the statue now, and from here I can see the true story. The monster's great insect wings are not attached to his body. They have been severed and are being held up to his shoulders by the wicked little priests who surround him. And his relaxed posture is not due to meekness or kindness, or even the calm dignity Other princes are said to possess. In the detailed relief of the back of the statue, I can see where his spine bulges, all the way up to his neck, from the great spike on which the priests have impaled him. The great redwing of High Ra Square is dead.

 

four

The Jade Bridge is one of the most famous sights in all of Caldaras. Its polished green archways and railings become almost translucent under the gleaming clouds in the sky over Lake Azure Wave. The lake's perpetual mist does not allow a view of the far side of the bridge, so it seems to rise into oblivion. It's a sight so wondrous, it could easily stop the breath in my lungs—if I weren't so distracted by the dead body, that is.

A small crowd has gathered, but the people have not circled so close as to obscure the limp figure splayed on the sandstone tiles outside the bridge's cityside guardhouse. At first, I might have mistaken it for a pile of gray rags, but for the fact that a hand extends from the jumble. It looks like a strange pale animal resting on the ground, with curving fingers that beckon even in their stillness.

Against my better judgment, I step closer, peering between elbows at the lifeless heap. It is a new discovery—people are not yet fully reacting. A chill ripples through me, despite the warm day. A man of forty or fifty, strands of wet hair stuck to his contorted face, dead in the street.

The crowd grows. Mutterings turn to shouts.

“Guards! Murder!”

As soon as one onlooker takes up the call of murder, others join in. Two guards rush over from the direction of High Ra Square; a third crossing the bridge hears the cry and quickens his steps toward the growing assembly.

“Citizens!” one of the guards shouts over the noise of the crowd. “Who was a witness to this? What has happened here?”

“Look at his face!” a woman cries. “Shock and horror!”

“That's a boilerman's jumpsuit. What's he doing up here?” a man says, pointing.

The swelling masses press in on me and I back up against the old guardhouse, unused now except for its convenient privy. Inside, I'll find Jey's ash bucket and petal brush, but I don't slip away just yet. Something keeps me.

Then, across the jumble of coats, hats, and hands, brilliant purple emerges. A priest of Rasus, tall and smooth, her small mouth drawn into a frown that echoes the concern in her eyes. “Guardsmen,” she says in a calm voice that cuts through the noise of the confused gathering, “I saw what happened.”

Now the people gathered on the Jade Bridge are no longer a crowd—they are an audience. Silence falls. The guardsman who spoke awaits the priest's testimony, notebook in hand, eyebrows raised matter-of-factly.

“Beloved,” the priest says. “Wicked times are upon us, for what lies prostrate on the Jade Bridge is not only a dead man, but a fairy tale come to life.”

I hold my breath, pressing my palms against the rusty guardhouse door.

The priest surveys the crowd and speaks with authority, as though she were addressing the faithful within the Temple. “When I found this poor man lying here—inexplicably!—the monster that brought his death had already vanished. But I knelt, hoping to bring him peace as he began his journey to the Eternal Garden.” People nod. Some touch their neighbors' shoulders protectively.

The priest gestures to the heap of rags. “‘Beloved,' I told him, ‘Rasus will welcome you. Let the Long Angel guide you to your destiny.' But instead of peace, there was fear in his eyes, and he clutched my arm.” She grasps her own arm violently in demonstration. Several people gasp. The priest goes on, her testimony more and more like a performance. “‘Holy priest of Rasus!' he cried. ‘Warn them! Tell the people that I have been killed by a redwing!'”

I blink. The crowd explodes into declarations, screeches, dismissals, but the guardsman with the notebook isn't writing anything down.

I study the dead man as well as I can from the back of the group. No redwing is responsible for this death, at least no redwing like me, and as far as I know, I am the only one. I watch the crowd. It's all so theatrical, so outrageous.
Do they believe?

Not yet. Not entirely. But enough to make this city vibrate just a little more.

Now the purple-robed priest is gone. I don't know if she had anything to do with this man's death. But she has planted a seed of fear.

I inhale, stepping away. Being at the scene of a newsworthy event is even more dangerous now that the editor of the
Daily Bulletin
knows my face. And murder or no, I have made a promise to my sister and to the vile bonescorch orchis. The rusty guardhouse door opens with a good shove. I find Jey's ash bucket and petal brush in a corner striped with light from a slatted window. Per my instructions, I leave my duster on an old shelf and step back out onto the street wearing only my sister's spare green gardener's jumpsuit. No one notices me.

I try to step with purpose—I am Jey now, and she has traveled this bridge many times. I stay to the side, running one hand along the warm, glass-smooth railing as I walk, and in my other hand, I can feel moisture building up on the handle of the ash bucket. By the time the bridge reaches the shore of Lake Azure Wave, the road has risen so high into the air that the lake is only sporadically visible through the haze below, flashes of aquamarine and dancing light. Even up here, I can feel its heat. Like everyone in Caldaras City, I am used to heat, but the damp warmth that rises from the boiling lake is intense enough to make me rub my forearm across my brow.