Chapter Eleven: Kindred Souls

+++++Anise+++++

Anise couldn't believe she was in the Chartham Canals - what would people think? Her mother got angry at her once for learning she'd gone to Old Town, and that had been to listen to a lecture by Sorceress Jue, who lived in one of the grand, ancient mansions there, both Jue and her home relics from when the district had been a lively hub of trade and culture. A young woman of means going to the canals, though, was social suicide, which was why Anise wore a brown dress and a shawl - dressed as a Nun of the Mendicant Mountain Order, nobody was likely to recognize her as the young socialite mage who'd unexpectedly made her 4th elevation a year or two early. Her understanding was that the nuns had an alms house somewhere in Chartham.

She was there because her uncle had blackmailed her. For whatever reason, he hadn't told the authorities that Ezra had assaulted him and escaped, and her newfound intuition suggested that this was because he wouldn't get to dissect the young man and find out what made him different from other thralls. Anise thought she already knew the answer: that his soul wasn't like a demon soul. It was much closer to a human soul, and yet his body had suffered extensive brain damage before he came to inhabit it, which meant he was somehow operating without a brain… and, free from the physical constraints of a brain's usual operation, his mind whirred away like a celestial machine. In any case, her uncle wanted to confirm this for himself and had blackmailed Anise into tracking him down because the boy seemed to trust her.

"I know your dirty little secret," he'd said.

And Anise had gasped, wondering how he'd found out her secret shame before she'd even been aware of it, herself. But he hadn't been referring to that at all…

"I know you love the boy… pathetic, but I can see why a moonstruck girl would think him easy on the eyes…"

Anise had blinked back tears. "Wh… what?"

"I know he seduced you, promised your little heart who-knows-what to make that potion for him. And I'll be damned if it didn't work. You have more talent than I'd gauged you had, girl… but you're also green and foolish. And now I've got your teats in a vise."

"My… what?" Anise was still trying to process how her uncle had gotten things so horrifyingly right and laughably wrong at the same time. She felt bad for Ezra… she even thought of him as a friend… but he certainly hadn't seduced her. An-Houla himself probably couldn't seduce Anise…

"I know you made his potion for him, and if I lay out my evidence and my sorcerer's testimony, I have no doubt you'll be cast from your little school and prohibited from practicing magecraft in the city. You'll be a pariah, a laughingstock, and utterly unweddable." Cruelty gleamed in his eyes. "But I am not a cruel man. Help me find him and bring him in and I promise I'll go easy on him. Like yourself, he's much more capable than I'd realized, and I can use a willing, brilliant thrall in the same way I can use a willing, brilliant niece…"

Anise made her way across a bridge, holding her breath to keep out the stink, the eyes of dozens of Chartham denizens upon her - as a human and disguised as a nun, she was as safe as anybody in the district, but she still drew attention. Through one of his contacts, Fenrik had learned that the boy was somewhere in the district, and he would let bygones be bygones if she could find him. He promised that he'd manage the actual dirty-work. Anise didn't like being used in this way at all, but she was in a tough spot, and if her uncle's hired toughs found Ezra before she did, he'd still be captured and the old man would probably ruin her life out of malice.

"Have you seen this boy?" she asked a random passerby for the fiftieth time.

The woman shook her head. "Sorry, sister."

Nobody had seen a young human man with bolted-on welding goggles - or, at least, nobody was willing to admit to it. Anise wasn't a contable-investigator, nor one of the dashing private detectives from the novels she'd read years ago. She was just an aspiring magistress who harbored a terrible secret. She also had excellent intuition and a little luck - presently, she kicked a can and was about to think nothing of it, since there was all manner of trash in Chartham. Only this can was glossy blue and unreasonably clean by Chartham standards. She crouched to inspect it… it was an empty bottle of axle grease… exactly like the sort she'd put in the little maintenance bag she'd prepared for Uncle Fenrik's carriage. She looked around… axle grease and about a dozen wire ties that might have bound the pieces of a tire repair kit together. Uncle Fenrik's glossy black carriage was nowhere to be found, nor was the squeegee she'd packed in the kit, nor the black velveteen bag she'd packed it all in. That had cost her a whole brownback. She surveyed the neighborhood for any other clues, her gaze flitting across the street from where she crouched: Mama Pathula's, the sign read.

+++++Anise+++++

Anise's uncle was blackmailing her, threatening to ruin her life… but, in all likelihood, her life was already ruined. All of her hopes, her lofty ambitions, were like ashes blasted by the firestorm of divine wrath. The best she could hope for was to hide her shame and hope that nobody ever found out that Anise was a pervert.

It was hard to come to terms with, the notion that the entire self-image that Anise had cultivated for her entire life was a farce - helpful, friendly, virtuous Anise. Dutiful daughter Anise. Future magistress Anise. Instead, she was corrupt in her very soul - or at least that's what her father's Old Sylvan Bible said. She'd never been very religious, and maybe that was the problem. She'd been corrupted and hadn't even known it. In a remarkably short time, she'd gone through the stages of grief:

She'd denied what her intuition told her, though the excuses her brain came up with were tissue-flimsy. She'd raged that such a thing could happen to her, Anise Derrigin, a good girl of good breeding. She'd sought out some way to alter her own soul to fix herself - almost every text she found suggested that this was invariably deadly, and those that didn't suggest this were dubious. She'd mourned the loss of her future, the loss of happiness… and, frankly, she was still dipping in and out of this state. But she also now accepted that this was the way things were. Either her life was utterly ruined or, at best, she would never be truly happy, because Anise fancied other women.

A middle-aged kao-etema woman lay on the shabby couch in the boarding house's common room, idly flipping through a dogeared cookbook. She glanced up to Anise. "Rooms are a brownback per week…" she started, sliding a thick set of spectacles over her face… "sister? I'm guessing you're not here for a room."

"I think my friend might be here?" Anise said.

The woman didn't even ask which friend that might be. "Third door of the upper hallway… but if they aren't there and you go in anyway, no amount of prayer will save you from a swift kick…"

"They?" Anise asked.

Pathula tapped at her spectacles. "The boy with the goggles and the fiery-haired one?"

Hmm… the boy with the goggles had to be Ezra, right? But who was the 'fiery-haired one'? Anise hadn't a clue. Maybe Ezra had found somebody already? That possibility shot a pang of jealousy through her - the notion that Ezra, the former thrall, somebody now presumably living in a Chartham Canals boarding house (though, notably, a nicer one than Anise might have feared), could have found somebody to share his bed with. Anise might never know that feeling - more likely, she'd be cajoled into marrying some man she felt absolutely nothing for. Ezra, for instance… if you got around the goggles, he was handsome in a boyish way that he might never grow out of. Anise could appreciate handsomeness in a man in the same way she could appreciate a nice, ripe plum. She could understand what other people found desirable in them but she didn't care for the fruit, herself.

No, instead, she'd recently come to the realization that the fluttering of her heart and the warm feeling in her belly whenever Franyi was close weren't the feelings of a girl who admired her best friend like a perfect older sister (though Franyi was two months older than her). These weren't the feelings of a sweet girl who wanted to be close with her friend and enjoy time with her. They were the feelings of a perverted girl who wanted to do horrible, disgusting… wonderful, amazing, beautiful things with her beautiful, brilliant friend. How could her brain have gone so wrong?

"You going up or not?" the landlady asked.

"I'm going up." Anise took a deep breath… something in the kitchen smelled like stewed fish… she calmed herself and headed up.

The upstairs corridor was cramped with slightly-uneven walls of unfinished or semi-finished wood and the occasional plaster-coated support. It was cramped but reasonably tidy, and Anise couldn't tell if the slightly pungent odor wafting across her senses was from an unwashed person in one of the rooms, the smell of the canals seeping through little cracks in the walls, or something wafting up from the kitchen. It was hard for Anise to imagine that people actually lived like this… and, with a start, she realized that there were probably plenty of people who lived worse. If her parents disowned her and she got expelled from the Etudium, would Anise wind up living in a place like this?

She stopped at the third door and knocked. She heard footsteps inside. The door creaked open, and it was… not Ezra…

"Who are you?" Anise said. She said it at the exact same time the crimson-haired young woman said it, though Anise could never hope to replicate that affectation of self-assured superiority. Nor could she ever hope to replicate the timeless beauty of her questing face, nor the strange inner light that seemed to pulse in her eyes.

"You're… an infernic?" Anise said. Obviously, the woman was an infernic - she had literal fire in her eyes.

"You're not," the woman replied, as if that was somehow a bad thing. The fire in her eyes dimmed to a barely-perceptible glow. "Are you… you're Ezra's friend?"

She gestured Anise inside, and she followed after into a small but neat room - too small to be shared by two people, but perhaps that's all Ezra and… whoever she was… could afford. Anise couldn't help but admire the woman as she swayed back into the room, her movements fluid, her simple brown dress fluttering like a leaf on the wind. Anise's ears went red - now she knew enough to realize that what she felt was attraction. How could her mind be so mixed-up? She'd give her left thumb just to be normal.

And there was Ezra… he had a haggard, harrowed look to him, curled up in a ball with red patches all over his skin. As she watched, he winced in pain, seemingly oblivious to Anise's arrival, and scratched violently at his arm, scraping at the skin, his mouth drawn back in a wordless grimace. She rushed over to Ezra, but the lightest touch upon his arm made the boy whimper… he was almost like he'd been when he first arrived at the city house with her uncle.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He… he said his pills wore off? He bought some other ones from an apothecary, but they obviously didn't do the trick."

Anise nodded. She glanced to the woman, who sauntered over and neatly plucked a little envelope of pills from the room's only furniture - a makeshift wooden desk. She handed the envelope over, her fingers brushing against Anises. She took a pill from the envelope, cracked it open, and took a sniff - it smelled a bit like ash, which meant the pills were some sort of alchemical treatment that had since lost its invigoration, making them basically useless as anything but a placebo. Any alchemist or herbalist worth half her elevation would know that, but clearly neither of these two did.

"Ezra? Ezra, can you hear me?"

Slowly his head turned, those black goggles moving to meet her expression. His face still wore a grimace of pain, but he managed a shaky nod. "Y-y-yes…" He scratched at his knee, drawing a bead of blood. Strangely, Anise couldn't see any other cuts on his body…

She sat down next to Ezra, cross-legged. The crimson-haired woman sat down with them to form a three-person circle, her eyes fixed on Anise in the way a house cat might regard a chickadee chirping about the windowsill. She looked into Anise with those fiery eyes but said nothing.

"Ezra, I'm going to run you through a focusing technique they teach us in the 2nd elevation… you won't be able to do the arcane aspect, but you might be able to do the sensory filtering…"

When she'd tried to run him through it before, it hadn't worked on account of the soreness it produced in his thrall-plug. But, somehow, the 3Z potion had allowed him to remove the plug, so it might work now. Ezra seemed to understand. Once more, he managed a shaky nod and forced his legs to twist into the same cross-legged position that the women had assumed. Pain and discomfort flickered across his face.

"Okay… now, I need you to take a deep breath, and slowly let it out. Pay attention to the feeling of air in your lungs, of the air flowing out like a river, how it's hot and moist, roiling out into the air around you. You can feel it in your nostrils… and you can also feel the air around you, can't you? The air imbuing your body - you take the air in… you let it out… air becoming a part of you and then being let loose into the world. You are a system within the world… feel your system, how it isn't really separate from its surroundings…" Anise had no trouble doing so, of feeling the world around her, of feeling every fiber and organ of her body, even the brain that had somehow betrayed her and made her into the wrong person, thinking its thoughts with clumsy meat, accidentally corrupting her soul into desiring… she refocused. If she couldn't maintain focus, how could Ezra expect to?

"Part of my body is not of the world," the beautiful woman observed. This was a fairly advanced observation for a neophyte to be making, but it was correct.

"Your soul is not of the world. It sits apart from it…" Anise said. "Feel that which is within you that's part of the world, and then feel what is not, what cannot be part of it. This is the shape of your soul. By feeling it from without with the awareness that sits behind your eyes, you will be able to feel from within, from the awareness that rests within your soul… and you will come to control your senses and the energies that…"

"I feel it," Ezra said. "That's… oh… wow… that's me…" If nothing else, the technique had taken his mind off of his suffering.

"Yes, that's your soul," Anise said. Saying that's me wasn't really accurate, but she wasn't about to nitpick.

"You're wrong, it is me," Ezra said, as if he'd had a line directly to her thought. "It's me. How is that…"

Anise felt something strange pulse through the air, and she was now attuned enough to recognize the arcane warp when she felt it. Which meant that somebody nearby had just elevated. Her eyes shot open, darting first to the fire-eyed woman, who simply cast a worried look toward Ezra. Then she looked to Ezra, back arched, trembling slightly, a long little whimper escaping his lips. He gradually relaxed, his body drooping slowly like a party balloon with a tiny leak. He lay motionless, his back on the wooden floor, his black-goggled eyes staring up at the ceiling - with the goggles on, it was hard to know whether he was awake. Anise scooted up next to him and lay her hand upon his chest.

She tried to sense the magic in him, remembering how wrong and how pitifully weak the magic that resided within him had felt before. Of course, back then Anise had been 3rd elevation and possessed the magical equivalent of a kao-etema's small, near-sighted eyes. Now, she could feel the magical energies surrounding Ezra in a lot more detail, and what she felt still felt wrong - but it did not feel weak. Arcane energy roiled within him in an utterly odd pattern, and with a lot more intensity than any Unpowered person would have. It was something more akin to the energy that a 3rd elevation Adept might cultivate - though, obviously, a demon-souled infernic like Ezra could not elevate. Their souls didn't work like human souls. Right?

"How does an infernic elevate?" she said.

"Ezra is a very smart boy," the infernic woman said.

+++++Anise+++++

Whatever it was that Ezra had undergone, it had knocked him cold, but not for long. While they waited for him to rouse, Anise glanced worriedly in his direction every thirty seconds or so, thinking he might wake up into the exact same scratching, skin-shredding discomfort he'd been in before. When she wasn't glancing toward Ezra, she spoke with the young infernic woman - she looked perhaps a year or two older than Anise, certainly younger than twenty. Her name was Rill, apparently. As might have been expected, she was an ifrit.

"I've never seen one with eyes like yours, though," Anise added.

They were hard to look away from, as if the molten pools of a great caldera lay within those eyes - the woman could tamp the lights down until her eyes became the color of red clay, but once she let her guard down, they'd pulse back to life. Ruddy and verging on red was the color of a normal ifrit's eyes, just as a nereit would have aquamarine, an aerojin smoke-gray, a mosswraith dull green, and so on. Maybe that was why Ezra had such trouble with his vision, more than his other overstimulated senses - he had no color to default to… though now, apparently, he had magic.

"My uncle captured you?" Anise asked.

Rill nodded uncertainly. "In a time of slumber - I had lain mostly-dormant for years, as happens from time to time. You'd best believe I'm active now - Ezra has to keep a low profile on account of his goggles, but I can wear a headscarf and sunglasses and nobody's the wiser."

Anise seriously doubted that - even dressed in a nun's brown habit like Anise currently was, Rill would stick out. Not just because she was beautiful, but because the way she bore herself could not be ignored. She'd been a goddess for what sounded to be many centuries, possibly millennia, and some aspect of that had been indelibly stamped upon her soul as it was stamped into a human body. Anise spotted some loose papers upon the worn desk and perused them. They were mostly pamphlets from some no-doubt-illegal demon liberation organization.

Kopel and Plenakton Declare: Slaves - Rise & Destroy Your Masters

...

All Souls Are Free Souls! Remove Your Plug or Die Trying!

...

Honestly, the fiery rhetoric was a bit much. If the pamphlet authors didn't endorse violence so outright, the press authorities might even allow it to circulate freely, albeit under heavy watch. This pamphlet, though, was printed on cheap, slightly-yellowed paper and with cheap purple ink, probably from an illegal press, but possibly from a legal one after-hours. And Anise recognized the paper and print well enough - it was exactly the same as that of the 'ziya ziti ziq̂o' 3Z potion recipe that Ezra had once given Anise.

"You've found other free infernics?" Anise said.

Rill regarded her coolly, perhaps deciding whether to trust Anise, or perhaps deciding what to do to Anise since she'd already decided that the answer was 'no'. The former, it turned out: she offered a cautious nod.

"Most of the people who give these out are urmal, for whatever reason. But I've found a few of us… or they've found me. Not many - there may be more, but even in this place, we have to stay hidden. I'm told other parts of the city are less… unpleasant."

"Most other parts," Anise agreed. "But a free infernic wouldn't last long in those parts."

"Uhh…" Ezra groaned.

Anise and Rill both rushed over to him. Rill's imperious bearing immediately shifted to one of doting concern, her fiery eyes gazing into the black of his goggles. Anise indicated that the ifrit should give her a moment to make an expert analysis, which was: Ezra was waking up. He scratched at his side, but Anise gently pulled his hand away and he didn't resist too much. He sat up and took a few deep breaths that Anise recognized from her focus exercise.

"I… I can stand it…" he said, and he wrapped Anise in a great big hug, sobbing into her shoulder. "Thank you…"

For her part, Rill looked annoyed. Not about Ezra being in his right senses again, but about Anise being the first one he hugged - though the ifrit had to realize that Anise had helped him pretty substantially while Rill had just been emotional support. After a moment, Ezra pulled back. His hand snaked out and found Rill's, and their fingers meshed in a way that Anise found adorable. With his other hand, he reached up and removed his earplugs, opening and closing his mouth a few times and then sighing happily. He held them out toward Anise.

"Those have been in your ears for weeks," she said. "You're crazy if you think I'm touching them."

He chuckled. "Fair enough. It's good to see you, Anise. How are things?"

She shrugged. "They could be better. My uncle is blackmailing me to find you… so, that sort of thing…"

He frowned. "He's… what? Does he… I don't know… can he track you? Are you carrying anything that he gave you?"

That was a good point. Anise checked her dress pockets and her bag - no, nothing from Uncle Fenrik at all. She breathed a sigh of relief. "No. I think I'd know - it would have to be a pretty substantial enchantment…"

"Um," Rill said. "What about a bird?"

And there, right outside of their tiny, cloudy boarding house window, perched Yacha, her sorcerer uncle's magpie familiar.