A Thousand Glass Flowers (The Chronicles of Eirie 3) (11 page)

Something
had poked an end out of the hollow.

She picked away at it as she thought of the strangeness of standing here, pulled from
the brink of death by Others.
Her fingers began to form the Horn but she stopped their curl and continued to poke and prod at the miniature shard with a fingernail, her mind trying to sif
t through chances and choices.
The roll pulled free and almost blew away in the puff of air blowing over the riverbank.

‘What’s that, Flower? What is it?’
The afrit, ever curious and more pleasant in an instant, jumped from rock to rock until he stood behind her
and looked over her shoulder.
She carefully pressed the delicate paper out flat where it lay like a tiny skeleton leaf imprinted with a spider scrawl of writing.

‘It’s Færan.
Lo
ok, Rajeeb, what does it say?’
The a
frit hopped from foot to foot.
‘It’s an important message,
why else would it be hidden? By Diff Erebi, do you…
could it?’

‘Quiet afrit, let me see?’
Rajeeb didn’t attempt to take the scroll from Lalita’s palm but his eyes widened and something cold passed down Lalita’s spine.

‘Ah, Lalita, Fate is a funny
thing.
There you were attempting to put an end to your existence and here you stand on the precipice of a life
that you could never imagine.
In your fingers is one of the most
sought after things in Eirie.
And suddenly you have become as valuable, by v
irtue of its possession.
A tiny secret shattered like glass by a simple accident.’

‘It
is
,’ the afrit whooped.

‘What?’
Lalita let the scroll roll up
on itself and closed her palm. ‘What does it say?
It looks like two words.’

‘Indeed.
And if spoken, could spell calamity or even worse.’

‘And calamity is valuable?
Then
I
am valuable.
The afrit has been telling me for weeks now that calami
ty and myself belong together. What are the words?’
Lalita opened her palm again, her thumb pressing the scroll.
‘Can you say?’

Rajeeb shifted on the rocks.
‘What you h
old is a cantrip, one of four.
The charm that bestowed immortality was destroyed not long since but there are three others, three that can take life,’ he snapped
his fingers, ‘just like that.
The one i
n your hand reveals two words.
I cannot speak them but if I were unprincipled and uttered the charm, then I could effectively kill any who
live within a hundred leagues.
A fo
ul charm, a devastating charm.
Lalita, I cannot underestimate the value of this for it speaks of our earth, our land,’ he spoke with emphasis, ‘and worse still, the dust
we could become, a speck in the air we breathe.’

Rajeeb told Lalita a brief history of the enchantments, of their longlasting shadow in the Vale of Kush and s
he sat with her grief on hold.
‘The power of these charms is monstrous,’ he said.  ‘It is rumoured that the malign of the Other world se
ek them to empower themselves.
If the Immortality Charm had not been invoked, it is doubtful anyone should have known
the Cantrips had been found. As it is…’ he grimaced.
‘But Lalita, there is even more to tell you, so much more but
not here, as the town awakes.
H
old my hand and we shall move.
Not far but far enough.’

The dark mists ceased swirling, Lalita dizzy with vertigo as she took her h
ands away from Rajeeb’s grasp.
The
afrit pushed at her shoulders.
‘Sit Desert
Flower, sit before you fall.’
He waved an admonishing finger and grinned as
she turned to brush him away.
‘Now now, remember if you are rude to an O
ther that calamity will occur.
Oh but
then this we know, don’t we?’
He chucked her under the chin and she fluttered her hand as if to chase away a mosquito but he laughed and added, ‘Disaster Damsel!’

‘He is frustrating.’
Rajeeb passed Lalita a cu
p of aromatic tea.
‘But he has watched over you and we must be grateful.’

Lalita blew
on the liquid before sipping. ‘I know. He watched from the beginning.
I remember walking with Salah from the Door of a Thousand Promises along a colonnade and the afrit
touched me like a soft breeze.
I was beleaguered beyond belief and he calmed me.’

‘Calmed you?’  Rajeeb snorted.
‘Then it
was definitely not the afrit.
He didn’t learn to calm you until
later and that was because…
’

‘Because you ordered
me too.’ The afrit frowned.

‘
I asked the afrit often if it was he and he would say,
Maybe, maybe not
.  I never really knew the truth of it.’

Rajeeb shook his
head as he studied the afrit.
‘I’m an odd djinn, Lalita, not given to tease and turmoil
like most spirits of the Raj.
In another life my father impri
soned me in a lamp for my… S
hall we say
my perverse lack of diligence?
I was a sore disappointm
ent but that is another story.
When I first glimpsed you in the colonnade, walking with such pride against such unbearab
le odds, I knew you were hurt.
I recognized the signs; a palpable h
urt that I wanted to cut away.
And when I heard your name, I real
ized Fate had sent you my way.
You see, I knew of your brother and thus it suited me to help you.’

Lalita’s heart jumped.
‘
My brother?
How?
Tell me.’

‘It is a long tale and I th
ink we must eat before I talk.
We are safe here for no
w and can rest uninterrupted.’
He pulled jars of spicy pastes and flat breads out of a b
ag, along with fruit and nuts and the afrit piled sweet nougats and stinging sherbets on top.

Despite impatience pulling at her like the Symmer wind, Lalita was hungry and welcomed food, glancing around at the building
in which they sat as she ate.
Louvred timber slats were shut against the glare of the day and shafts of light pierced the cracks, small motes of dust s
wirling in some dervish dance.
Long racks lined the walls and in the humid gloom she could see greenery lying in piles on the shelves.

‘Silkworms.’
The afrit picked up a leaf, showing her the ivory caterpillar cutt
ing away with scalloped bites.
In his other hand he held a silky chrysalis.

‘But there is only one silk house in Ahmadabad and that is behind the palace walls,’ she dropped the flatbread, smearing pa
ste over the thin silk kaftan.
‘Rajeeb, you have magicked me back into my prison.’
She stood, heading toward the door.

‘Not at all.
’ He clasped her hand and pulled her back with infinite care. ‘
This is as goo
d as any place for the moment.
The silkworms were fed earlier, we are safe from prying eyes and I shall only have to move you this evening when t
he fresh leaves are delivered.
When the time comes I shall move you somewhere equally secure, have no fear.’

Despite the easy confidence of the djinn, Lalita’s nerves jangled, tiny wires stretching tight an
d then loose, tight and loose.
‘T
hen tell me of Kholi, please.’
She rolled a velvet-soft peach in her hand and her eyes glistened.
Tell me of my brother, of my family, because now I have none.

‘Ah Lalita, this is a ballad you could have written in the Sultan’s book –
a grand tale of love and loss.
I could take the rest of the day to tell it.’

Lalita grabbed his hand.
‘Tell and I promise I shall listen and say nothing.’

‘She’s good
at that,’ chuntered the afrit.
‘There were whole days gone by in the seraglio and she might as well have been a mute like the rest of them.’

Chapter Ten

Finnian

The mystique that surrounded the four Gates of Færan was the stuff of myth, the locations never divulged outside of Færan and puzzled over for a
eons by both mortal and Other.
But Isolde’s library had been thick with i
t and Finnian had read it all.
That the Ca’ Specchio, Palace of Mirrors, house
d the Venichese Gate, he knew.
Once through, he could find his way with speed to the Raji Gate which opened close by Fahsi.

As he stepped past the gilded glamour of the Ca’ Specchio, his fingers moved to the parchment fragment in
his pocket, his lucky charm.
He rendered himself invisible and passed between a bevy of cleaners set on polishing the t
errazzo floor of the ballroom.
Another regiment swirled large dusters over the mirrored panels of the walls and more still draped large sheets of calico over lowered crystal chandeliers, swathing fragile gilt chairs in similar coverings.
H
e wound his way between the shrouded furniture to walk through a mirrored panel in front of him
as if it had never been there.
He glimpsed the cleaners as he passed but they were blindly oblivious to his very existence, unaware of his exit.

On the other side he pulled to a halt, turning back to glance at the mirror that had stretched, thinned and then
dissolved to allow him entry.
It had been like passing through a soft veil, one that blurred his vision momentarily so that when his sight sharpened he sucked in a breath.

A glistening, pristine scene reflected back from the looking
glass panels.
Inculcated with the dour and severe within Castello, he could hardly believe wh
at stretched beyond his boots.
The
ballroom was indubitably a mirror image of its mortal counterpart but here the mirrors gleamed like the ice sheets from Oighear
Dubh in the far southern seas.
Between the panels, the walls had been papered with fine silk in soft buttery stripes, as if a beam of spring sunshine had be
en cut and laid down the wall.
The furniture glimmered with celadon silk and the candelabra sparkled, three lines of them swirling a
way down the frescoed ceiling.
Light danced off the lustres and illuminated the room with diamond fire, prisms shifting and changing as if they were a
troupe of tiny dancing wights.
He stepped forward, tapping staccato across the marble and as an echo reverberated, he stopped.

Footsteps behind…

He turned toward t
he mirrored wall to his right.
Nothing, not in any of the reflections.

But listen, what’s that?

He turned to the left and walked a couple more paces, strai
ning for sounds of a follower.

Tap, tap went his feet.
Tap, tap
went their echo and he stopped again and swung quickly back to the left.

There,
in that mirror, a reflection…

He spun to the opposite mirror as his heart began to gallop
.

No, you are n
ot there…

But she was.
In the mirror Isolde lay on a bed propped up on pillows, her face as white as the linen, her flesh pulled hard against the skull, her white
hair lying crazed around her.
He shivered in the knife-sharp glare of her eyes, her e
xpression acute and pointed.
He waited like a whipped cur for her to speak, to scour his spine with her cruel temper, but she remained silent
and he hated her all the more.
She had never been silent, ever, and this new Isolde, a quiet, piercing figure, was ter
rifying even to the grown man.
He turned quickly and threw open the double doors at the far end of the room, slamming them shut behind, leaving the image buried amongst the reflections
.

I imagined her.
She cannot know where I am.

He clipped down the marble stair th
at curved to the ground floor.
Through the main doors he passed, never sighting an Other, leaving the nightmare vision behind until he reached the wide landing and the duplicate waters of the Venichese laguna.

Escape!

Black gondolas drifted back and forth, no gondolier at the oar, some e
ldritch force propelling them.
Inside were Færan of the most gracious and beautiful kind, young and old, waving to each other, whispering behind hands and splayed fans.

Only ever used to the machinations of Castello and the rhythms, energies and circumstances of that grubby quasi-mortal life, he moved cautiously toward the eldritch boats, unable to help casting an eye behind.
Safe?
He climbed into a moored gondola, sitting awkwardly on the seats amongst pillows made for lounging, under a canopy that shielded him from weather, to watch as the ropes untied themselves, right over left over right and under a
nd then coiled out of the way.
The gondola’s prow headed between the mooring poles, to turn again midst
ream.
He floated down the Grand Canal, the beautiful city drifting past.
She can’t have found me.
It’s impossible
.
He wiped a hand over his mouth.
This world of Færan overlays the mortal world, gulling
me into believing she sees me, that’s all.
Surely she doesn’
t see me. She can’t.
He pulled the curtains aside.
Da
mmit, which is the way to Fahsi?

Gio’s glib line of fortunes and F
ahsi had set Finnian’s course.
Where else would a thief take hi
s goods to sell for a fortune?
Somewhere in the souks, at some stall or other,
he would find what he sought.
His gondola rocked as the water tumbled against the sides and Finnian was drawn from his self-indulgence to glance upward.

The cana
l city’s brilliance had faded. A cracking,
dry breeze scraped past his face as he watched the stuccoed buildings with their quatrefoils, studded doors and regiments of mooring poles dissolving like w
et paint sliding off a canvas.
Cliffs the colour of watermelon manifested and sharp-beaked kites and black vultures wheeled, shrieking like banshe
es in the moaning Symmer wind.
He had passed from one place to another as easily as walking through the Venichese mirrors and the discovery thrilled him and he heaved a long sigh.
Far from Isolde.

His gondola had metamorphosed into a scrappy blue craft with an upturned bow and painted eyes
that glared to ward off evil.
The opaque ochre river along which he floated rose
and fell over rocky outcrops.
Swollen with Symmer rains, it slid over boulders lining a precipitous gorge until Finnian was swirled into a bend where his boat scraped and thudded onto a long wall of
ghats that edged the current.
In the blink of an eye, in the passing of a boat over water, he had left Veniche and entered the Raj at Fahsi.

Mothers and grandmothers lifted great slabs of wet clothes and slapped them against the wide steps that made up the ghats; grandfathers bent their stiff backs
to wash their faces and necks.
Children laughed and splashed in air that held the promise of heat and thirst despite the shadow cast by the pink, monolithic walls of a citadel.

Finnian slipped behind a skein of folk winding their way up step
s to a gate in the city walls.
He glanced at the people around him, a mixture of fine faces and ugly, plainly woven clothes, women’s heads draped in cotton saris, men crowned by fold upon fold of turbans.
Mortals.
I’m back from Færan and once again with mortals and so
quickly as not to notice.
He hated his surprise, hated that he was so ingenuous but cared more that he had left Isolde far behind and that the paperweights might be within his grasp.

An anguished cry echoed from below and he turned to see an old woman dragging at the body of an elde
rly man floating in the water.
The mortals around him invoked Aine the Mother but it seemed something they
expected…
that an old man should die in the arms of his wife as they washed themselves in their sacred river.

No one gave him a second glance
,
such was the nature
of this melting pot of Eirie.
He was just another infidel from south of the Goti Range, pallid and ordinary
like a thousand in the town.
He kept to the shade, not for fear of discovery but because in the white brightness through the gate in the wall, the city heat smothered him like a scorching blanket.

A sea of humanity – where had he read
that?
One
of Isolde’s books to be sure.
People ebbed and flowed and the multi-lingual ambience drifted
on the scarifying desert air.
He climbed a shadow-swathed stair by the side of a house and stared down at the crowd, at their swirling madness and it seemed to him they had no purpose other t
han to mingle in a tight mass.
But as he scrutinised the faces of the hundreds in the crowd, he realised that they did in fact walk decisively, their destination in their mi
nds, their business half done.
He remembered being told that mortal minds went at a frenetic pace, thinking of dozens of things at once – especially the women as they moved – a shoal of brightly coloured fish dipping this way and that.

The crowded bazaar in front of him stretched into a dusty distance where the entrance to the covered souks gaped cavern-like in its darkness, enticing, for it promised cool as well as curiosity, but he could go
no further dressed as he was.
The weight of the oilskin smothered him and as he hoisted it off and held it over one shoulder with a finger, he heard a voice from below.

‘Effendi looks very warm.
Would he like some new clothing, cool as the Symmer breeze at night, ligh
t as the fingers of a hourie?’
The face gazing up leered with half the teeth missing in gums almost concealed by an ill-trimmed moustache, the remaining t
eeth stained with betel juice.
Hair hung in oiled, inky ringlets from the side of a turban
that sat rakishly on the head.
He held up a fold of pristine clothes and Finnian bent to touch the
light fabric.
He studied the fellow but the trader merely winked, a knowing flick of a heavy eyelid.

‘You’re…’

‘Maybe.
Maybe not,’ this strange djinn replied, the smell of garlic and cumin rising as he laid his f
inger by the side of his nose.
‘Isolde’s Finnian, you would be
far more comfortable in these.
C
hange through that door there.
The souks w
ill be far more enjoyable and profitable
if you are cool.’

How do you know me?
Does she know
I’m here?
His gut crawled as he took the clothes and turned for the
door the djinn had indicated.
He stripped, standing naked for a moment as the sweat cooled on his skin, and as he pulled a dark grey embroidered kurta over his head he wondered how it was Isolde and her cohorts could have found him so soon and he feeling safe for less than a moment.
Have they?
He shivered in his newly cool
clothes and looked behind him.
H
ad Primaflora spread the word?
Had she carried it in her chirpy little voice to the doves and had the
doves carried it on wings to Ba
duh, that speedy sprite of the Raj responsible for message delivery?
W
ould the Siofra be so specious?
On the one hand saying how important it was to find the charms and keep them safe and then on the other to tell all and sundry?
Resentment crawled over him.
An image of the dead Poli, guts split open on the deck of the
Cullenen
,
and the old woman holding her husband in her arms filled the cloistered space in which he changed.
Death, death, death.
He balled up his old clothes and threw the heavy tangled mass into the corner.

Outside, he searched for the greasy djinn but there was predictably nothing, just a feeling of paranoia weighing on his neck as he crossed the bazaar, weaving between busy people and past the noisy, fragrant camel lines.

The camels moved from hoof to hoof, turning their heads to gaze about with
baleful, nervous expressions.
Finnian sensed something in the air and turned, his attention focused on every
detail of the massive square.
A kizmet snatched at his hair, tearing it back, and his nerves stretched that bit further.
Something’s wrong.
The wind doubled back and blew between the camels’ legs, sand and dust swirlin
g in a fretful column.
Finnian realised the danger of that funnel but then so did the mortals as disturbed fingers reached for amulets and voices called on a blessing of safety from Diff Erebi, the king of djinns.