Mayut raised an eyebrow. ‘
Jejeh’na
. Wise beasts of silver-tongue.’
Rhin nodded.
Mayut glanced towards Merion. ‘Why you follow this little warrior?’ he asked.
Rhin answered quickly. ‘He once saved my life, and now he is my friend.’
Mayut nodded. This was logic he could understand, universal in its simplicity. ‘And you do not have his answers?’
Rhin bowed his head. ‘I wish I did.’
‘Khora!
Mayu n’sasah
!’ Mayut barked to his shaman. Khora sprang to life, snatching her bones from the ground and rattling them around in her cupped hands, humming some odd little tune.
Merion’s heart began to beat, faster and faster. Was this the moment he had been longing for, since that day he had stared at the blood on the steps? Was this it? Would he finally be able to fit the scattered pieces together? He was already writing the letter in his mind.
Dear Constable Pagget …
The bones rattled on and on. Khora’s sweaty face rippled with straining veins. With a cry she released her charms, and they scattered in the sand. Merion’s mouth had gone dry. His fists were beginning to ache from clenching.
‘What do they say?’ he blurted.
‘Silence,’ Mayut hissed. Khora look up at him and made several motions with her hands, drawing squiggly lines in the air. Merion’s chest thumped.
‘
Res ahm? Te Akway
?’ Mayut whispered. Khora nodded. She looked drained, and strangely confused, as if her bones had fallen uselessly A dull ache began to spread across the young Hark’s ribs.
Mayut rubbed his hands together. ‘Khora has spoken. You sleep here tonight. In the morning we leave.’
Merion cocked his head. ‘Leave? Leave for where? Do you know who killed my father?’ he asked.
Mayut shook his head. ‘To know this, you first know other answers. To questions you not ask. Bones give Khora no more tonight. We take you to Akway. He will hear your questions.’
Merion was one lip quiver away from whimpering. ‘And this Akway will know who murdered my father?’
Mayut shrugged. ‘He might,’ he replied. ‘But might not. We will see. Tomorrow. Now, we dance. Do you dance, Merion?’
But it was all getting too much for the boy. This constant oscillation between hope and hopelessness, between thumping fear and downright exhaustion, was becoming unbearable. Merion just wanted it to be over.
Merion shook his head, declined politely, and then promptly slumped to the ground. Lurker led Mayut away, whispering in his ear. Rhin came over to thump Merion on the leg. ‘What’s wrong with you, Hark?’
Merion threw up his hands and let them fall onto his legs. ‘Will this ever end?’
‘That sounded like progress to me.’ Rhin tried on a smile, but somehow it didn’t fit.
Merion stared at the whirling dervish of bare flesh that spun around the fire. Rhin put a hand on his knee.
‘You sure you want to do this, Merion? Sure you want to know the answers? Mayut could be right, you know. About the consequences.’
‘You sound more scared than I do.’
Rhin shook his head solemnly. ‘I’m scared for you, Merion. You’ve got a heavy burden to bear as it is. Can you really stand it being any heavier?’
But Merion seemed resolute. Hearing his own doubts in the faerie’s words somehow bolstered his stubbornness. ‘The answers will lighten that burden, not make it heavier. Why do you think I crave them so much? Why do you think I’m here, in this Almighty-forsaken desert?’
Rhin winced. ‘I’m not so sure you’ve considered what—’
Merion glared. ‘Well it’s not you that has to be sure, now is it?’
The faerie held up his hands and backed away. He had seen enough tantrums in his time, seen the silver spoon spat across the room on many an occasion. ‘Fine,’ he said calmly. ‘Now come and watch the dancers. Distract yourself until tomorrow. Nothing needs doing until then.’
Merion huffed, but the faerie was right. Merion got to his feet and sauntered to where Lurker and the chief were now sitting, at the edge of the crowd, inches from the spinning, convulsing dancers.
His backside found a warm spot to Lurker’s left, on the opposite side from the chief. Rhin settled down next to him and whistled. ‘I think you’re too young for this, Merion.’
Merion found it hard to argue with that.
You could say one thing for the Shohari, that they are far from shy.
Merion could not help but stare as he watched the Shohari girls twirling around in front of him, barely a scrap of material between them, their only coverings bright splashes and stripes of purple and blue paint.
There were men too, of course, dressed with masks made from the furs and feathers of desert cats and huge vultures. But it seemed that this dance was a female’s domain, that the rhythmic pounding of the drums and wailing of the strange instruments was for the women, not the men.
Their dance was mesmerising. Feral to the core, they swayed and danced and yelped. It was hypnotic, the way their long limbs moved, as if they had no bones at all. Like shadows, they moved, black against the light of the huge pyre, shaking all the while as if possessed by maniac spirits.
Merion’s eyes widened as a group of women moved closer, eager to please the chief and the strangers from the south. They flashed their sharp teeth and howled as their serpentine bodies moved to the drums. Merion’s jaw hung agape. He found himself blushing as he caught their wild eyes, one at a time. He would never have admitted it, not in a thousand years, but Merion couldn’t deny the stirrings in his groin, the swirling of sudden emotions. Manners faded away. There were no fathers here, no watchful aunts.
It was then that Merion noticed Lurker was averting his eyes, staring at the sand instead of the naked display. He could see the downward angle of the man’s hat in his peripheral vision.
Lurker spared not a glance for the female form. His eyes were fixed at a spot just inches from his legs, and far away from the dark, sweaty skin only a few feet from him. There was a shadow over his face, but Merion could tell he felt uncomfortable.
‘Lurker?’ Merion asked.
Lurker sniffed and cleared his throat. ‘Miles away, boy. Never you mind me.’
‘Is it the dancers?’
‘No, they’re fine. Too fine for me, perhaps.’
Merion had to admit that he did not follow.
Lurker tutted. ‘Too familiar then,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Had me a Shohari wife once, for a spell. Year maybe. Maybe less. House fire put an end to that.’
Whatever it was, something had loosened Lurker’s tongue a little. Perhaps he felt safe here, surrounded by the wild, strange Shohari. Perhaps he’d sipped more of his hipflask than usual. Whatever it was, Merion did not complain.
Lurker kept talking. ‘Was after the war, and we was livin’ out in the sticks outside of a tiny town called Hopeoak, near Denn’s Folly in Ohio. Folk in the town weren’t right in the head, not so soon after the war. Blamed my sort for a lot of things, and weren’t too keen on Shohari neither. What a couple we must of made to them. We were just two demons living on their outskirts, and they didn’t like that.’ Here Lurker took a breath. ‘Went up to Crickshaw one day to fetch some new pickaxes. Took me hours to get there, it was so damn hot. I’d been in a fight the week before, and a busted knee still hadn’t healed right. I was slow as a drunk mule.
Lurker paused here to sniff and stare at the dust some more. ‘I saw the flames from the next hill. Thought it a brush fire or somethin’. But no, it was our house. It was all rubble and cinders by the time I hobbled to it. Lehlana was dead inside. I didn’t need to see her all healthy and soft again to know her throat had been cut before the fire. The fucker that did it left the knife on the table.’
‘Who?’
Lurker rubbed his nose. ‘I don’t rightly know, but I must have killed him at some point or another…’
Merion was puzzled. ‘But … then how do you know?’
Lurker met Merion’s eyes then. His voice was cold and half-dead. ‘Because I went down to that town and killed every last man I could lay hands on. Gun. Knife. Rock. Whatever my fingers found, I used. Spilt blood in every saloon, store and outhouse that shit-creek town had to offer. I got every one of those murderous bastards, and when I was done I marched right out of there and didn’t stop running for two days. Came west and never looked back.’ Lurker broke off his stare, and Merion finally took a breath. He was starting to understand what the chief had meant about the cost of the truth. The truth was that Merion was rubbing elbows with a mass murderer.
‘I hear they call it Deadoak now.’ Lurker didn’t sound proud, but then again he didn’t exactly sound apologetic. Merion tried to see it from his perspective, and wondered what he might do if he had a dead wife, and a townful of murderers to hand. Merion found himself nodding. ‘My father would likely have called that justice.’
‘As would the Fae,’ Rhin said.
Lurker sniffed again. ‘And that’s what I tell myself,’ he said. ‘And so now you know about me, and what I’ve done. Will that shut you up for a while?’
Merion nodded. ‘I suppose it might. For tonight at least.’
‘Well, fortunately for me, you got other ears to scorch tomorrow, besides mine. Though good luck getting answers out of these mouths,’ Lurker chuckled. ‘Here, have some of this.’
With a tired groan and a creak of leather, he leant across the chief and grabbed a clay bottle. Mayut grinned at Merion while Lurker uncorked it.
‘Is it alcohol?’ he asked, sort of hoping it was.
Lurker disappointed him. ‘No, no. Just a mix of herbs, oils, and other things. It’s good. Everybody here is drinkin’ it,’ he said, motioning at the whirling lines of dancers.
‘I shall not be dancing.’
‘Don’t worry, just drink.’
And there they were, those famous, everlasting words of wisdom. Words usually and liberally dispensed by those already well down the river of drunkenness themselves. This drink was altogether more
interesting
than alcohol. It was s
ho’aka
, an old Shohari recipe, and it was potent stuff. Merion felt it hit him almost instantly; little tendrils of warmth worked their way up his spine and into his shoulders. He liked it.
After a few more gulps he wiped his hand across his mouth and passed the bottle back to Lurker, who also took a few swigs. Together they sighed and turned to watch the dancers, and slowly the sho’aka wormed its way into their skulls, and began to work its magick.
Merion felt warm, that was for sure. There was a fire in his stomach, bubbling up his throat and into his cheeks. His eyes felt dry. They kept snagging on his eyelids, every time he moved them. They were heavy too, like musket balls. Why was his mouth so wet? Was he hungry? He had to keep swallowing to avoid drowning in his own spit. His teeth felt rough.
The hooks of irreality slid under his skin, and gradually his night began to warp and change. Colours burst in the fire. The dancers became taller, and darker, like strange shadows dancing before a funeral pyre. One moment he was standing. The next he was sat down, Rhin grinning at him. Time hopped back and forth like a sluggish toad, and somewhere in that swirling, muddy soup of moments and images, Lurker got up to dance.
It was not a moment of drunken hilarity. Nor was it a moment of cheering and yelling. It was a moment that only Merion seemed to notice, as he lay there supine in the sand, one eye half-closed and the other blinking continuously. The young Hark rolled his head to one side, watching Lurker walk on the side of the world. His steps were slow but determined. The closer he drew to the fire, the darker he became, until his form danced and wavered like the others spinning around him. It was then that Lurker did a strange thing.
Button by button, garment by garment, Lurker began to undress. Merion squinted. In the flashes of light, and as Lurker turned from side to side, he saw the marks.
There were scores of them. Thick red lines, criss-crossing his back in a web of torture, as though the man’s back had once been flayed apart and then woven back together. Merion found himself sucking on his teeth as he imagined the pain, the screaming.
‘John,’ he whispered, even though he knew Lurker couldn’t hear him. He soon lost sight of him in amongst the naked bodies.
Merion turned back to the dark sky and let it spin. He was melting into the sand, he could feel it. Rhin would have to come dig him out in the morning. In between the nonsensical ramblings of his addled mind, Merion found himself mumbling a word over and over again, like a charm to keep his questions at bay. Sleep had started to paw at him, and he was more than ready to let it drag him off. He was starting to feel rather sick.
‘Tomorrow,’ he whispered. ‘Tomorrow.’
Tomorrow he would get to the bottom of all this. Truth be damned.
ANSWERS FROM AKWAY
‘Close. Far too close for my liking. We were headed for the stairs to the northeast tower. I was in the suitcase, all wrapped up. His father came out of nowhere. Demanded to know what the boy was doing. Got to hand it to the lad, he spun out the yarn. Karrigan’s suspicious now though.
Merion’s spent the night in his room. I’ve spent it up here, with the pigeons and curious spiders. At least I’ve got something to eat.’
16th May, 1867
S
weating was once again the order of the day, though this time, Merion thankfully did not have to walk. The grogginess of whatever he had imbibed the previous night still hadn’t quite worn off. Twice he had emptied his stomach, much to the amusement of the Shohari. Though the fresh air had set him right again, thank the Almighty.
By midmorning, he had decided that the little piebald pony he had been allotted needed a name, and that name was to be
Gorm
. It dribbled. It wheezed. It constantly wandered off the beaten trail. It spent long minutes just staring at the grass in front of its long nose: Gorm by name, gormless by nature. He was nothing like the ponies and small horses Merion had ridden in Caravel, on the dark beaches of the west coast.
Gorm’s only redeeming feature was the fact that Merion could ride him. Even though his back was bony, and he had to be constantly kept in check with sharp tugs of the reins, by the time the Shohari stopped for water Merion’s feet had not touched the sandy earth for almost four hours. It was blissful, and his aching feet thanked him.