Ariah (7 page)

“
No, I’m all right,” she said. “Fond memories and all, but my roof don’t leak. It’s all yours.”

She left me there with her younger brother. He ran a hand through his hair—a bright, shocking red—and nodded towards the dilapidated house. “Well, let’s get you in, get you settled. Your name’s Ariah?”

“
Yes,” I said tentatively.

“
Well, is it or isn’t it?”

“
It is. Ariah. Ariah Lirat’Mochai. A pleasure to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. We were still standing too close together, and it was awkward, holding my hand out in the thin thread of space between us.

He took my hand. “Yeah, sure. Same. You hungry? Thirsty?”

I stole a quick glance at the disheveled house. “No. Just tired, I think.”

He ushered me inside with an arm draped around my shoulders. I didn’t know how to react to that, so I chose not to react at all. Somehow, the interior of the building was worse off than the exterior. He made no apologies for it. Inside, a dozen or so scrawny, hard-eyed youths milled around, all of them obviously of mixed heritage. “This is the gang,” he said. “The Natives. Nahsiyya to a man, and all City-born. With your eyes you’ll fit right in.” He whistled the same piercing, sharp whistle as he had out in the Square. “Hey! This is Ariah. He’s bunking with us.”

A woman with creamy skin and wild, woolly black hair poked her head around a door frame. I felt my throat close up at the sight of her. I was terribly attracted to her. “You vouching, Sorcha?”

“
Yeah. You’ll never guess where I found him.”

“
We can all guess where you found him,” said a lanky girl with Qin eyes. She sat in the broken shell of what had once been a window, one leg trailing to the street.

“
No, you really can’t. I’d lay a bet on it, but I’m not so heartless that I’d take everything you got. Caddie, hey, you got to hear this.” The attractive woman with the wild hair came back into view. She leaned in the doorframe, her chin held high and her face stony, expressionless. “Found him with Abbie,” Sorcha said. He was savoring it, the delivery of all this news. “Lor came back, and he brought this fella with him. Caddie, he
came back
.”

“
What? Really?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Then where the fuck is he?”

Sorcha shrugged. “Think he’s with the folks already. Abbie said he bolted. Left this one with us.” Sorcha leaned back, angling his body to face the Qin-ish girl in the window. “You guess that? Eh?”

The girl scoffed in feigned disinterest.

“
I’m gonna get him settled,” he said. He took my hand in his and started towards a set of stairs I did not trust in the least.

Cadlah whistled. “No one settles here unless they’re with us.”

“
Aw, c’mon.”

“
My house, my rules,” she said.

“
He’s on loan!” Sorcha said.

“
No one settles here on loan,” she said. “He wants to sleep here, he’s got to abide the rules. Got to join up.”

I was tempted to say that I did not actually want to sleep there, that I was being forced to sleep there, but I held my tongue. Sorcha sighed. He let go of my hand and pushed me towards Cadlah. “Fine. Whatever. I know you; you’re just doing this ’cause you like stabbing folks.”

My head whipped around to face him. “What?”

He pointed to his ear. The top of his ear was pierced and threaded with a thick gold ring. “Mark of the Natives, right, and now you’re getting one, too.”

Cadlah pierced my left ear. Oh, it was terrible. She sat me down in the kitchen—easily the best-maintained room in the squat house—and pulled a bottle of whiskey and a set of tools wrapped in leather from a cabinet. The tools were medical in nature: a clamp and a long, vicious needle. It also held a set of gold rings. The needle was sharp, but harrowingly thick. She poured a glass of whiskey and dropped in the needle. “What’s your name again?”

“
His name’s Ariah,” said Sorcha.

“
Right. Ariah, we got rules, yeah? You want to stay here, you got to abide by them.” She looked me directly in the eye as she laid them out, counting them on her fingers as she went. I stared right back, bloodless and on the verge of panic. I, like most with a tendency towards shaping, do very badly with pain. The fact that she was about to hurt me very much undermined that nascent attraction I’d harbored moments before. “One: cause no problems in the house. Don’t pick fights with the rest. Two: bring no problems to the house. Last thing we need is a peacekeeper sniffing around. The courts are always a heartbeat away from demolishing us and then we’re on the street. Keep your nose clean out there. Three: stay clean. Addicts always end up breaking those first two rules. Give the poppy dens a wide berth. Got it?”

“
Yes.” It came out half-whispered, strangled.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You agree?”

“
Yes.”

“
Good.” She made me shake on it, narrowed her eyes once more to make sure I knew she was serious about it, and reached for the needle. She grabbed my ear with the clamp, which had narrow holes worked into its feet. I had a moment of panic and tried to stand up, but she held me in place with that damned clamp. I squealed in pain. She scoffed at me. “I’ve not even pricked you yet,” she said. And then, with a sure and steady hand, she shoved the needle through my ear. I howled, but still she wouldn’t let me go. She told me to keep it down, but I couldn’t. The faces of the other gang members crept around corners and watched me weep. It stung worse when she fed the ring through. She clamped the ring shut, patted me on the shoulder, and told me it was official. Now that I was appropriately wounded, I was allowed to sleep in that awful place.

Sorcha frowned at her and shooed the other Natives away. None of them ever let me live that undignified moment down, by the way. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders again and led me up the stairs. His room was private by virtue of the length of his tenure with the Natives and the amount of money he contributed weekly to their communal pantry. Room, though, was a very generous term. Space, as I have mentioned, is notoriously tight in the City of Mages, and it’s even tighter someplace like the Natives’ squat house, where half the space is not structurally sound. His room was really more a closet. It had exactly enough space to hold a narrow mattress and a single chair. Planks of wood had been nailed to the wall in one corner, and the shelves held Sorcha’s clothes and other sundries. A tall, heavy mirror with clouded glass leaned against the far wall. Tacked above it were a series of sketches of someone who was unmistakably Sorcha, done in an oddly familiar hand. A Semadran lamp—a well-constructed one, which operated by windup clockworks—hung on a peg nailed above his bed. It was the single source of light. All in all, it was a cell, but one which was well kept and inviting. “Right, drop your bag wherever. You want something to take the edge off your ear?”

“
I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t. I could feel the blood oozing out of the wound, and it made me lightheaded and nauseous.

“
The hell you are. ’Bout to swoon, you are.” Sorcha rummaged among his shelves and pulled out a pipe and a satchel of pipeherb.

“
No, no, I’m all right!” I said.

“
Not yet, but you will be. Come with me.” He stuck his pipe and the drugs in his vest pocket, threaded an arm through my elbow, and led me out of the room. Down the hall was another set of stairs, ancient stairs of crumbling stone which had once led to a third floor, but which now led to the makeshift roof. He led me out, guided me across the “safe spots,” and goaded me until I jumped down onto the platform he’d been on when I’d first arrived in the Square. Night had fallen properly by then. The only people in the Square were the Natives. It felt private. The night, like all desert nights, carried in it a crisp coldness. My coat had been confiscated at one checkpoint or another, and I sat in the dark with my ear aching and my teeth chattering. Sorcha laughed and told me to stay where I was. I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. He scaled the wall and hopped back down a few minutes later with his clockwork lamp, a spare jacket, and a violin. “Here. Wear this.” He turned the lamp on and inspected me once I’d pulled on the jacket. “You’d cut a figure in City clothes. You’re built like me. That fits you right well.” He plucked a string of the violin as if to tune it. “So, you run with Lor, do you?”

“
I’m Mr. Villai’Muladah’s student,” I said.

“
His name’s Lorcani.” He said it with a resigned disgust, like it was an argument with me he was already sick of having. “What’s he teaching you exactly?”

“
How to manage the gifts.”

“
Tink stuff.”

“
Yes.”

He plucked a string. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “You know he’s like me, yeah? Nahsiyya. Mongrel through and through. He’s not Semadran proper.”

“
I think he is,” I said. “He’s in the boroughs. He has a student. We’re picky; we turn people out. Maybe blood doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks it does.”

Sorcha frowned and turned back to this violin. “I’m telling you, he’s not Semadran. So, what’s your story?”

“
I don’t have a story.”

“
Everyone’s got loads of stories. Why’d you come all the way out here? With Lor, I mean. Considering why he’s here.”

“
It seemed the right thing to do.” I poked gently at my ear. Sorcha clucked his tongue at me and batted my hand away, citing the threat of infection. I drew my knees into my chest and stared out at the falling night. From the edge of my vision, I saw the orange flash of a lit match. Sorcha drew on his pipe and handed it to me. I was alone, in a strange place. My ear stung fearfully. I was bone tired. And there was something about Sorcha I trusted. He was one of those people where right from the start there was a bond. A friendship sprung up fast, easily, all on its own, without any effort on either of our parts. There was a simple consonance between us. I knew he and I were different from one another. I knew what the grins meant, what they signaled. And it should have given me pause. It should have made me uneasy. But honestly it didn’t seem to matter much. I took the pipe with little hesitance. I smoked a little and fell into a coughing fit. Sorcha patted me on the back, laughing quietly, until it subsided. And by then the herb had taken hold, and I didn’t care as much about the pain. No one talks about this, but it’s an open secret among shapers: drugs dull the gift. Herb slows things down, closes you off, and lets you relax into a bit of privacy. It made me less aware how evident my pain was to Sorcha, which made it matter less to me.

Sorcha played the violin. He sang a little. His voice did not change much between speech and song; it was situated somewhere between the two naturally. I settled against the wall of the squat house, wrapped in his jacket, letting the music wash over me. It didn’t take very long for the fatigue to get the better of me. I think I may have fallen asleep; I’m not sure. Eventually, though, Sorcha tired of the violin or the outdoors or both. He elbowed me, and I started. “Want to crash proper? You look frightful tired.”

“
Yes, I think so.” He laughed, and I looked at him in confusion. “What?”

“
The way you talk,” he said. He shook his head. “It’s all proper. And you sound human, you sound mundane the way you talk. It’s just odd.” He laughed again.

I laughed with him. “If I stay here long enough, I’ll end up sounding like you.”

“
Yeah?”

I nodded.

“
How long would it take you?”

“
I’m not sure. A week, maybe two.” He scoffed. I considered not telling him, but then it came to me that he was not Semadran and did not hold Semadran standards of politeness. “I’m a mimic.”

“
You are not.”

I glanced over at him. I grinned. The herb may have still been idling in my blood. “Want to crash proper? You look frightful tired.” It came out in his voice.

He blinked at me. His eyebrows flicked up. “Well, shit. Guess you are at that. How do you do that?”

“
Oh, well, mimicry is one of the forms of magical expression which…”

“
No, I mean what does it feel like?”