AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I kept the name of my first other-body. It amused me, as it seemed neither male nor female, and there were many more forms to follow, of both sorts. I am not Yi: The bodies do not crumble around me. I simply move to the next fleshly costume when I tire of them. I do not truly understand what it is in the spirit of a Yi which corrupts a body around it, but I was never to suffer that dissolution. I was a good student; eventually, I even helped the Man Dressed in the Moon to pass to his next body. I knelt reverently and cut open his stomach, and prepared the next body for his passing. I placed the white stone on his new tongue; I was the first face he saw with his new eyes—which were wide and violet as a field of lilacs, the eyes of a still-lovely dowager who had died of chill.
It was in that body that the Man Dressed in the Moon became my lover. The Yi are in truth neither male nor female, but follow the desires of their host bodies—and there never was a dowager who did not yearn to have a young Prince as her paramour. We passed many years in this way, and even when the dowager’s flesh became gray and cratered, I did not mind. I kissed those peeling, pockmarked limbs, and they were sweet, sweet as dried gardenias. We continued in this way until we exhausted each other—for neither was there ever a dowager who did not eventually grow bored with her beardless playmate—and I went from that house into the world.
All this I learned; all this I performed. When I left his house, no Nurian corpse-wrangler could have approached my knowledge, though her lust for it might burn like winter timber. When my parents died, I took their bodies—ah, the debauch to which I subjected those limbs! I punished them in their own skin.
But I am not Yi. I do not take bodies in order to achieve some mystical union with a mythical Moon. What I do, I do for pleasure, and for profit, and it is pleasant enough. I am not bound by their laws, I need wear no barnacled cloak, and so I move among the people of Shadukiam unknown and unmarked—and only once or twice have I been too impatient to wait for a creature to die.
For I am not Yi; I can take them while they still breathe.
I am not Yi; I will go on forever, in whatever body I choose, and the Moon will never take me.
“SO PUT YOUR DAINTY LITTLE MARK ON ONE OF those famous parchments. It has always been true that a figurehead’s only power lies in her golden seal—no one cares what you say, but we all care what you sign. Give me access to the Caliph’s rose-tinted gold, sign open the door to the great vault, and I will keep your spirit safe until the time comes for you to return in a body as ravishing or de formed as you wish, until your name is forgotten by all but the most dotard librarians in the Dreaming City, and no one will drag an army after you again.”
“You don’t want…” I looked down, blushing.
“What? Your firstborn child? Use of those lissome limbs? I’m not a monster out of some child’s tale. I have no need of living bodies, and children are more costly and troublesome than beasts twice their size. Do you think there is a pleasure of the flesh I have not sampled? I do not need the Caliph’s trash. I am a magician—it is a vocation like any other, and I require remuneration for my services, as any other tradesman would. Would you try to pay for grain with unborn babes? I think not. Do not insult me; I am no less skilled than a miller grinding his seed.”
I nodded humbly, and the necromancer kissed my shuddering lips then, and my brow, my hair, my chin. It was not in lust that his lips brushed my face, but as a strange sort of seal on the bargain as I eagerly scrawled his demand onto a used and crumpled leaf of paper—on the one side it demanded that the merchant-monks of the Coral Tower open their vaults to the Caliph; on the other it demanded that the vault of the Caliph be opened to Marsili.
“What do I do now? How do I know you will keep your promise?” I asked, clutching my elbows to my sides.
“You will know because I have sworn it, and you are the trusting kind. You may want to work on that, the next time you see this city from the inside. This is Shadukiam, after all. Here the trusting are found every morning in one gutter or another. You need do nothing more, sweet Ragnhild, little ragged girl, left all alone.” He reached forward and wound a thin length of my hair through his fingers, then, with a sharp flick of his wrist, tore it from my head. “Wait to die.” With that, he retreated from the antechamber, bowing gratuitously as he went.
And die I did. The Nurian Papess dragged me from my seat by the ear as though I were no more than a misbehaving child and forced me to my knees before my own altar. With a strange, curving silver knife she cut my tongue from my mouth, and the taste of blood, the meaty, metallic taste of my blood, flooded my mouth. I screamed, I screamed—I thought there would never be an end to the screaming. She moved the knife in the air speculatively; with ridiculous attention I noted its sickle shape, its hilt, the fine engraving. In the midst of pain like stones breaking open the knife filled my vision. I thought then it would be my nose next, or my eyes. I did not understand yet the shape of zealotry.
Ghyfran, the savior of Al-a-Nur, ripped my dress from collar to waist, and cut my breasts from my body as if carving a roasted bird for her supper. But when they had sloughed to the floor with a sickly, wet sigh, she leaned into me, her breath brushing my ear.
“I have saved you, poor, wretched pawn. Now you may go to the dark as a sacred Androgyne, and no door of alabaster or diamond will be closed to you.”
That is your heroine-priest, this lying whore who forswore her god in order to kill an innocent—then forswore her oaths of office with her adherence to her mad faith. What is Al-a-Nur but a bedchamber where you may luxuriate in lies and blasphemies, convincing yourselves that they are virtues?
They tied me to that wet, grassy hill, pressing up under my back like the bones of the moon, and the soldiers dangled these chains in my face, mocking me—it was the only gold, they said, I would ever get from Al-a-Nur.
The rest is simple, unutterably common. The sun took my flesh away in its arms, and the moon whitened my bones to dust. I fell away from myself, into some deep well of dreaming—I recall nothing from the last gasp until I awoke, washed in gray light. The necromancer Marsili had bound me bodiless in some strange glass vial, and I watched him as the years flew by like blackbirds—sometimes he was a woman, sometimes a man, sometimes a child as he had been when first he came to me. But I learned to recognize him in each body, the upturn of the eye, the cruel crooked mouth, the gestures of his hands. I learned, and more than that. The necromancer performed many horrible things in his workshop, and I learned from him all the magic he learned from his bodies. After all, he was the only thing I saw for all those years. I had nothing to do but become a student of his every sigh and gesture.
And yet, he waited, he waited for so long. I thought he had forgotten me, that I would be stuck in a bottle like a scrawled note forever. But one midnight, when I had almost lost the memory of what it was to feel my own flesh, he picked up my vial and brought it to a long table, where a golden-haired corpse lay stiff and still.
“You are only a legend now, Ragnhild. It is safe to come out; it is safe to live. The world remembers you only as a ghost in the closet, a wight on the grassy hills.” He gestured at the glassy-eyed corpse on his knotted elm-wood table. “I keep my word, as any merchant does. She loved a boy her parents could not accept and starved herself to death for the lack of him. Terribly romantic. Are you ready, is she sufficient?”
He sensed my consent in some fashion of his own, and when I woke again, my lids were fringed in lashes pale as raw flax, the weight of a body pulled once more at my bones, and the last vapors of a white stone were still dissolving on my tongue.
RAGNHILD LOOKED DOWN AT US, ANGER STREAMING from her as though
from a dying star. “This time I went to no man’s bed. I have had time, and time piled high upon time, to consider how I would spend my new body—and I chose to be in truth what I was before only in jest. I will be your Black Papess, and take Al-a-Nur for my own. I bought the Caliph’s blessing on my ascension with Marsili’s gold, and came to Shadukiam, not on a litter like some pampered babe, but walking on the stony earth, and I did not lower my eyes when I saw once more the Dome of Roses.”
I swallowed hard. “And Marsili? He gave over his wealth just to bring you back to this little room?”
Her face folded into a satisfied smile, and the Black Papess rose from her flowered chair, the violet gown shifting and trailing obscenely over her skin. She walked past us slowly, without fear, and drew aside a thick cream-colored curtain covering an alcove behind us.
On a deep green cushion edged in silver rested the head of a young, dark-haired beauty, the line of her nose clearly noble, the shape of her lips suggesting an ineffable refinement. The colors of death spoiled her skin into a bluish ravage, and dried blood clotted around her severed neck. Ragnhild turned her head delicately as though appraising the artistry of a statue.
“I watched him for five hundred years, trapped in that glass like an ant in amber. I hated him. The first real hate I had ever known—the first of many. I have begun to keep a catalogue of hatreds, and this was the first in my ledger: the hatred of the trapped thing. He waited so long. I think he would have left me there if he were not bound by love of this city to provide the service he was contracted for. That is the soul of Shadukiam, after all. He was my first act in this flesh—I took his head and his gold in one stroke. You mustn’t pity him. What kind of a man seduces a child into centuries of death-which-is-not-death for a few rubies from the Caliph’s table? He was a fool and a glutton.”
She closed the curtain with a slow hand and turned back to us, bright-faced.
“Will you kill me now or will you wait for a less guarded opportunity? I admit I’ve been wondering if the inevitable attempt would be daring enough to come while I am ensconced in my antechamber, attendants a mere door’s width away—or if the new oath-breakers would wait until I was asleep. For you are oath-breakers, are you not? Your order forbids violence, and yet, here you are. How very Nurian of you—the will of the gods is supreme unless the Papacy needs a puppet.”
Bartholomew walked to her very slowly, his head bent in real respect, and when he spoke he made his voice as comforting as our snouts and lolling tongues can manage. We held our breaths, waiting to leap to his aid the moment she moved.
