Stands a Shadow (9 page)

His usual route was a circuit of streets to the east of his apartment, an area that was prettified with the greenery of parks. He turned left at the Getti playhouse and followed a boulevard alongside the Drowning Gardens, seeing the rich greens of the trees and shrubs through the flicker of the iron railings, the contrasts of red-robed pilgrims scattered amongst them. In the street, building-sized paintings of the Holy Matriarch snagged his eyes, and the lesser placards for new restaurants, housing developments, brands of alcohol and food; he tried to ignore their simple messages, but the images flashed by and left their impression nonetheless, the smiling white-toothed faces of happy affluence.

Joy Street lay at the end of the boulevard, and next to it his mother’s Sentiate temple. Ché had been ignoring his mother of late, unable to bring himself to visit her. He didn’t wish to be reminded of what she represented in his life, nor of her role within the order. When he saw the Sentiate tower looming ahead, its scarlet flags raised high today to show that it was open once more for business, his mood began to falter along with his pace.

He turned away before he reached Joy Street, and entered the Drowning Gardens instead.

He followed a straight paved path between the shorn lawns. On the hottest of summer days he would sometimes run in these gardens of glittering pools and broken shadows to escape the clammy heat of the streets beyond. Today, though, he saw that it was a mistake to come here, for the pilgrims were drowning themselves in earnest.

Ché ran past stone pools with pilgrims kneeling all around their rims, heads plunged deep in the water. Occasional bubbles broke the surface, and some flailed their arms without control as they forced themselves to remain submerged; the more dedicated had their arms bound behind them with leather belts. He skirted around attendants of the Selarus, the priests working over prone forms, pumping water from lungs, breathing into mouths, slapping faces to revive them. One pair was carrying a limp form away.

He sprinted even faster, with the effort pulling the breath from him. Ahead was a congregation of dancing pilgrims, so thick he saw no way through them. Ché wasn’t in the mood for stopping.

With a feral grin he put his head down and charged into the crowd at full speed, shouldering the men and women out of his way. Like a raging bull he tore his way through the mass of pilgrims as men and women spilled to the ground or pursued him with their shouts of anger.

He emerged on the other side fighting for air. His brow was wet, and when he dabbed it with his fingers they came away red.

Onwards, with the rain gently cleaning the blood from him, the taste of it mingling with the taste of the Royal Milk in his mouth.

When he returned to the apartment he realized he’d forgotten to bring any coins with him to get back inside the building. He cursed and pulled the doors in vain, but then the door opened from within – one of his neighbours stepping out – and Ché ducked inside.

He jogged up the stairs and entered his apartment. Whiskers was just crossing the room and she glanced at him with a frown on her reddened features. A whistle was shrieking from behind her.

‘Good timing,’ he noted as he stepped past the woman, pulling off his clothing as he moved towards the bathroom and the source of the high keen. Whiskers hurried past him. When he entered the bathroom’s steamy atmosphere she was already turning off the gas flames beneath a great copper pot fitted tightly with a lid. A jet of steam was shooting from the whistle fixed in the lid, and it died quickly as Whiskers opened a spigot near the bottom of the pot, to release a flow of hot water into the tiled bath sunk into the floor.

Naked, his mood still high, Ché pinched her rump as he stepped around her, and gave a quick smile in return for the scowl on her whiskery face. ‘You’re too good to me,’ he told her as he stepped into the few inches of water in the slowly filling bath, and lay back and sighed as it rose gently around him. Whiskers eyed him scornfully.

He closed his eyes as his body grew lighter in the water. His skin burned pleasantly, and he heard the woman roll up her sleeves and kneel beside him. Ché sighed long and deeply as she scrubbed him down with a flannel of rough sharkskin and one of the balms his mother had insisted on giving him for his troubled skin. Methodically, she worked on the rashes that covered his body, and he groaned at one point, in something approaching sexual pleasure, at the relief it gave from his constant itching.

This life had its benefits, Ché reflected idly. Not least of all a hot bath every day if he wished for one; no small thing that, in a world where most people were lucky to wash in a basin of cold water with copal leaves for soap.

You’re getting soft
, he thought, and wondered what his old R
ō
shun master Shebec would think of him now, if he’d still been alive to see him.

Whiskers cleaned the small cut on his brow, making no enquiries either by gesture or by look. When she finished, she sluiced the water from her hands and left him to enjoy his soak alone. His mind was still clear from his run. He placed a sodden flannel across his face and breathed through its clinging embrace, feeling tired all of a sudden, the effects of the Royal Milk finally fading. Perhaps he’d sweated them out of his body.

Ché yawned and knew he would sleep soon. His thoughts drifted like the steam in the room, and in small measures he allowed them to contemplate the bizarreness of the night now behind him, and what was to come the next morn.

War
, he thought with a sudden sobriety.
Tomorrow, I set off for war
.

A letter was waiting for him on the table by the front door when he arose in the afternoon from his sleep. Whiskers was gone, returned to her slave quarters in the basement of the building.

He had an aversion to letters. They came bearing only bad news or reminders of responsibilities. Still, he picked it up anyway and opened it.

His mother. The leash they kept on him to ensure his loyalty to the order.

Ché held the letter for a while, not sure what to do with it. In the end he opened the drawer of the table, and took out a plain piece of paper and the stylus and ink. In careful lettering he wrote:

He blew on the ink until it was dry, then folded the paper carefully, and scratched instructions for delivery to his mother at the Sentiate temple. He left it where Whiskers would see it.

For a moment Ché considered sending an invitation to Perl or Shale, or even to both of them. But the young women would expect their fair share of pleasure narcotics for the evening, and would expect him to join them in their vices. He didn’t feel like being intoxicated tonight, nor most nights for that matter; he didn’t like where his mind sometimes went in those altered states.

No, better if he remained inside tonight so that he was fresh for the morning. Besides, some peace to himself would be a luxury in itself. Best to make the most of that too while he still could.

Ché dug out his leather backpack and started to pack for the morning, wanting to be done with it so that he could properly relax. He packed some clothing without any great attention to what he was doing, though when he came to his bookcase he paused, and sat down to give some it proper deliberation.

It was Ché’s job to know as much of the world as he possibly could. Hence the shelves held many travelogues and diaries and books of maps, and texts of religion and history. It was this knowledge, Ché sometimes suspected, that really lay behind the sense of distrust he sometimes felt from his handlers; this abundance of learning of other cultures and the ideologies that ran contrary to Mann.

In the end he selected one of the works by Slavo, an account of the Markeshian’s travels – imaginary most likely – to the far side of the world and the foreign peoples he’d discovered there. It had been a while since Ché had read that one.

As an afterthought, he turned to his copy of the Scripture lying closed on top of the bookcase. Only once had he actually read the thing in its entirety since his return to his life of Mann. It had been part of his re-education after living all those years as a R
ō
shun apprentice in the mountains of Cheem, when the spypriests of the Élash had slowly reintegrated him into the ways of the divine flesh, before informing him that he was to become a Diplomat for the Section.

He lifted the thin volume and packed it only reluctantly.

In the darkening hours of evening, with the living room lit by gas lamps, Ché sat down in his armchair dressed in a clean white robe, his stomach comfortably full, a modest glass of Seratian wine in his hand, gazing out onto the street below, lost in thought.

His mood of earlier was long gone. Instead, he felt vaguely depressed now that his packing was done and there was nothing left but to wait for morning, the reality of it finally sinking in. This life of a Diplomat allowed him to exist in relative, blessed isolation from his peers. Now, though, for weeks on end, he would be expected to live shoulder to shoulder with his fellow priests, and the Matriarch and her entourage of sycophants. He would have to watch his every step, his every word. Not an easy thing that, not now with his thoughts running ever more contrary to everything around him.

Since Cheem and his betrayal of the R
ō
shun, a seething anger had been rising within Ché. He could feel it whenever his temper snapped in a dozen little ways during the course of an ordinary day, or when he said things he shouldn’t be saying, or when he provoked those of authority with his seeming arrogance towards them, which in truth wasn’t arrogance at all, but a nonchalant mental shrug, a lack of caring. It was as though he wished to be challenged on his behaviour, as though he wanted to have it out with the priests at last, regardless of the consequences. A kind of deathwish perhaps, gathering slowly in momentum.

Ché took another sip of the wine, appreciating the soft rasp of bitterness against his palate, the perfect accompaniment to the peppered rabbit he could still taste from dinner. In the kitchen, he could hear Whiskers cleaning the dirty pots and plates.

It had stopped raining at last, and people were stepping out to enjoy the evening entertainments of the streets below. For a while, Ché watched a pimp running his little empire from the corner of the street, the fellow strutting and preening himself beneath the streetlights. When he grew bored of that, he shifted his attention to a group of young men and women sitting on a low wall behind a tram stop, passing hazii sticks amongst themselves, chatting and laughing, warming each other with their companionship. They seemed not much younger than Ché, yet he watched them as though with the eyes of an old man.

At first he didn’t notice Whiskers as she emerged into the living area, her hands folded before her, waiting to be relieved for the night. The woman cleared her throat, and he turned and blinked and stared at her tired, sagging face.

Ché had no idea what this woman was really called. Non-indentured slaves weren’t allowed names as a rule, save for what their masters chose for them; hence he’d coined her nickname when he’d first been given the keys to this apartment, and laid eyes on the house-slave that came with it, this middle-aged woman with blonde downy hairs on her face and a pair of fierce blue eyes. He knew that she was from the people of the northern tribes, though only because of the colour of her hair, and the blue-ink tattoo he had once glimpsed on her upper arm.

Not much of a life, he’d often thought. Seven days a week at his beck and call with only the late nights truly to herself; and even then, only if she wasn’t required in her master’s bed. He imagined she had been well used by her previous masters, for she was womanly enough. He’d toyed with the idea himself for a while, before deciding he preferred more consent in these matters.

Behind Whiskers, shadows hung across the apartment in heavy veils that shifted in the gaslight. They hid the clock that ticked its isolated ticks on the far table, and the piles of reference materials stacked against the wall, and the lacquered globe of the world, turned so often it needed oiling again already. Not much else, though, save for emptiness and bare walls and the sounds of the world outside it.

‘Stay a while longer,’ Ché heard himself say to the woman, motioning with his open hands.

She seemed to misunderstand him, for a little colour came to her pale features.

Not for the first time, a suspicion crossed his mind that perhaps Whiskers really could read lips, as many slaves learned to do after they’d been rendered deaf – and that she was keeping the fact to herself for reasons unknown to him.

‘No, I didn’t mean . . .’ He shook his head and looked away, then noticed the ylang board on the small table before him. He gestured to it. ‘Perhaps you could join me for a game, if you play?’

Her stare took in his gesturing hand then returned to his eyes. Pity crossed her features. For an instant he saw it clearly, and he wondered what caused such an emotion towards him. The woman remained where she stood.

‘Wine?’ he asked, holding up the bottle above an empty glass.