Aliyah

One look at Zahir’s Healer badge—the silver curled like an open hand—and a simple ‘she’s with me’, was all the pair of guards on duty needed. She sort of expected it, but it was still discomforting to see them practically scrape and bow to let them through.

They descended, Zahir first and Aliyah second, into the dark core of the castle dungeon. The spiraling staircase whorled ever-onwards.

She was wearing one of Zahir’s old Healer cloaks over her maidservant uniform. It made for plausible-looking apprentice’s gear after a hasty hemming—though the fabric carried a lingering scent of rosewater and what she strongly suspected was burnt hair. She clung to a makeshift lantern: two freshly-charged, bulbous sun-lamps lashed to a pole.

Zahir held a set of crooked keys which he used to unlock and relock gates on the way down; Aliyah averted her eyes from their light. Lightning-white runes flitted over their surfaces like fractal insects, and perceiving them induced a roiling nausea that she could not dampen by merely cheating parts of her own biology. Twice, she had looked for too long and had to turn away to gag.

They were three gates down when she strained her ears, shifted more than a few mechanoreceptors around, and asked “…Is that singing?”

“I believe so. People can have unusual responses to pain.”

She digested his response for a minute. She fixed her eyes on the back of Zahir’s head, glancing every now and again at the tempting glint of the nausea-keys hooked onto a loop at his belt.

They walked. The air felt cool and dry against her face.

“So do you torture people?” she blurted out, then winced immediately afterwards. Very polite, Aliyah, she thought. What an innocuous and unprovocative accusation.

His stride didn’t falter. “Hm? What makes you ask that?” His tone sounded oddly neutral—blandly cheerful, even. It was the tone he used when feigning polite interest at courtly visitors.

“You mentioned pain. You have keys to a dungeon. Which I assume involves torture, if the princess’s spy is being held there. Because—um. Magicians.”

“Indeed,” he said, and her heart sank.

“So. You either stole these keys from someone, which is bold even for you, or…”

“Or…?”

“Or you come down here to torture people.”

“Hmm,” he said in that odd tone again. “The Magicians torture people. I’m just a simple Healer.”

“Simple Healer. Right.” Aliyah scoffed. “So you heal the people that they torture?”

“True enough, but there’s more to it than that. Think about it. And…?”

Aliyah mulled over that one for a little longer.

“…and you heal them so that they can be tortured again.”

“Right on, little Aliyah. Take some time to process that if you need to.”

She was suddenly and acutely aware that she was following a verified torture-enabler down into the bowels of the castle, with multiple locked gates behind her.

It’s still Zahir, she reminded herself. The reason she was not currently doubled over in chronic agony. The at-times irritating, sort of flighty mentor with a habit of nicking fresh vegetables from the hydroponics department. She’d known him for long enough to know that he was trustworthy, right? Second-rank Healer Zahir Saar-Salai, who maybe-probably-definitely wasn’t going to hurt her.

Her gaze moved from the back of his head to the sliver of his neck that was visible over the collar of his robes. She wondered idly as to his reaction if she were to hit him there with the sun-lantern she was gripping, right in the junction between his atlas and axis bones. She brushed the intrusive thought away and focused on walking. For a little while, the world felt as if it only existed in pieces.

The echoing sound of their footsteps on stone.

The yellowish-white glow of the sun-lamps.

The flicker of the keys at the edge of her vision.

The faint, faltering prisoner’s song at the edge of her hearing, until she dropped her ears back down to their normal sensitivities and the sound flickered out.

It was Zahir who broke the near-silence as they stopped to unlock yet another gate. “Second week after registration, we take the apprentices down here and see if they can handle it,” he said. “It shapes them into excellent blunt weapons.”

She thought of the two hundred and six bones in a human body, from the delicate stirrup of the ear to the curve in the ribs, the deep crevices of the skull. Of how they could be splintered beyond recognition and then uncrushed, reknit, made whole. How she probably couldn’t do that.

“Well, um. If they fix people and not rats, that would make them better than me,” she said, trying not to sound bitter about it.

“Would it? Clumsy little learners, it matters not if they mangle and maim.” His tone grew darker still. “Sometimes, they are even encouraged to.”

“Uh. Are you…alright?” It was the most somber she had ever seen him.

“I’m well, thank you,” he said, a blatant lie.

It felt like watching someone sinking while standing on the riverbank. Old children’s tales of madness-workings woven into the very mortar of cursed castles crowded into her head. Ridiculous, of course. She shivered, doubted that there was anything she could say or do. Zahir was an excellent, if sometimes irritating, mentor. At times, he was flippantly morbid in the way that a lot of Healers seemed to be. But never before had he betrayed such disquietude. She drew the silence around her like a shielding, stifling blanket as they walked and walked and walked ever-downwards, with only the sun-lamps to light the way.

Zahir stopped before the final gate and simply stared at the lock.

“Zahir?” she asked a little frantically when he did not move to open it.

“Forgive me,” he said, shaking his head, seemingly emerging from a reverie. He started on the lock. “It brings back memories. I actually haven’t been down here since I was an apprentice.”

So if he had participated in inflicting torture, then it had been many years ago. That didn’t make her feel less uneasy.

The last gate clicked open; beyond, a surprisingly well-lit corridor with doors—some with viewing windows, others impenetrably opaque—set into both sides. The sing-song prisoner’s tune emanated from within one of the opaque doors; a light, feminine voice that produced more of a pained warble than distinguishable words, interspersed with long periods of tuneless humming. Door four on the left side, she noted. A warden, tall and broad with a rippled scar across one cheek, stood next to it. He rested his hand on the pommel of a shortsword at his hip.

“Sir Healer,” he said, dipping his head. He eyed Aliyah, frowning. “And…new apprentice, is it? I must say that Lady Sadrava’s current condition is…well, the young lady may wish to remain outside.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Zahir said.

“Very well, sir.”

The warden unlocked the door from which the singing emanated. Zahir opened it and entered. She followed close behind, feeling distinctly as if she shouldn’t be here.

“Shut the door, please,” he called over his shoulder.

She did so and when she turned back to the room, it was all she could do to stand and stare for a moment.

There was a table, a big metal table bolted to the floor at the center of the room. There was a body on the table and it was covered in blood.

She was no stranger to injuries, but the sheer amount of blood gave her pause—so much blood in stark contrast to the minimal brightness of the torture room. The metallic tang warred with the stink of strong disinfectant. She held her breath for a moment, then started to carefully breathe in through her teeth. Harsh lights. Plenty of visibility. She forced her eyes to adjust and to break down the sight in front of her.

The prone form on the table was a young woman, chained up, not dead, humming softly. She was dressed in sparse, bloodied underclothes and her face was turned away from them. She had long, dark hair and tan skin that looked a touch paler around what Aliyah could see of her blood-stained cheek.

Zahir stood by the table and unhooked a contraption from his belt—a large, egg-shaped, silvery thing that made the air cold with a magical working as it unfurled like a clockwork flower. Aliyah felt her ears pop as she approached. She recognised yet more nausea-inducing runes on its insides and hastily averted her eyes.

“Lady Sadrava,” he said. “I am sure you can ascertain that this is a legitimate shielding. Speak freely.”

Alhena’s so-called right hand and spymaster stopped humming and turned her head to face them. She looked about Aliyah’s age, only with a more finely-shaped, classically-beautiful face—a face that was contorted in pain, eyes scrunched up and lips pressed tightly together. She cracked her eyes open; they were a disconcerting and unnatural shade of ice-blue.

She was chained to the table by each limb; a cruel-looking collar encircled her neck. The rune-chains vaguely resembled the princess Alhena’s at her execution; Aliyah scanned her for signs of necrosis, but found none. Instead, cuts had been opened all over her body. The yellowish, bubbly gleam of adipose tissue peeked out from a long, gaping gash on her calf. Most of the wounds weren’t actively bleeding—some sort of powerful Magician stasis, applied through the chains?—but the shallower cuts oozed fresh blood. She glanced away to the floor, noted pinkish water dripping into drainage-grates at the base of the table—drainage grates?—and took a few slow, shallow breaths. Concentrate.

“Good day, Saar-Salai—or Zahir, was it?” Lady Sadrava said, voice hoarse with pain. “All this ‘Lady this, Sadrava that’, it’s rather lost on me now. I prefer Kionah.”

Aliyah felt sick.

“Very well, Kionah,” Zahir said, as if he were not speaking to a bloodstained woman chained to a table. “I have been told that you have divulged very little information.”

Kionah squeezed her eyes shut once more and winced in response.

“Myself and my student were both present for the execution of your patron, the Princess Alhena Shadowsong, earlier today,” Zahir continued.

Kionah cracked an eyelid open. One of her hands made a faltering, dismissive movement; Aliyah’s stomach, already tender from the onslaught of nausea-runes, lurched as she saw that her fingers were missing the nails, ragged and bloody.

“Yes. I know,” she said slowly. “I know your game. Answer questions first. Then healing. Then unhealing. Then more questions.”

“How inefficient. You can’t possibly be expected to articulate yourself in such a state.”

He placed a light hand upon the tattered flesh of Kionah’s shoulder. And then her numerous wounds melded shut, like it was nothing. Her fingernails regrew too, keratin surging smoothly from their roots.

Aliyah stared, wide-eyed. Zahir had healed her so cleanly and precisely, in a manner of seconds. An irrational pang of envy struck her square in the chest. To achieve something similar would have taken her, what, at least an hour? And it would cost her blood and a headache, a rather lot of both. As far as she could see, he was barely breaking a sweat.

“The Princess Alhena’s last words were ‘it is too late’ followed by ‘they are coming’,” Zahir continued. “What is the meaning of this to you?”

“It means it’s too late,” said Kionah wearily. “It means I’ll die with the rest of you, if not by the Magicians.”

“Kionah, who are ‘they’?”

She laughed. “What reason do I have to humour you?”

“Lady Kionah. Where could you run if I let you go?”

Aliyah’s idling thoughts came to a screeching halt. What had he just said?

“Pardon?” Kionah croaked.

“You were caught fleeing. Not found hiding with a dagger in hand, not backed into a corner now that your princess had been caught, but fleeing. So am I correct in presuming you have some way of leaving Shadowsong? Or has that skyship long left port?” He smiled tightly at his own joke.

Kionah remained silent.

“Do tell, Lady Kionah. I have seen the changes in the Magicians. I know they were the ones who revealed your treachery, but how could they have known your movements so intimately? That is a pretty question indeed.”

“You already know what the magicians want. Power.”

“I will ask again. Can you flee somewhere safe if I let you go?”

He couldn’t be serious. Aliyah could feel her heart rate rising. She was starting to—quietly—panic. This was treason, wasn’t it?

She pinched herself discreetly, felt her nerves respond in kind. Definitely not a bad dream, then. She hadn’t thought so—her nightmares tended to be less about other people bleeding—but Zahir’s words were starting to make her understanding of the situation fray at the edges.

“And why would you do that?” Kionah laughed softly. “The Magicians won’t kill you. Too useful. Also too much to lose if it were traced back to you.” She paused. “And many answers to gain along a line of questioning that dangles freedom in front of my nose.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have a better chance of escape if I tell my student to flee with you.”

Aliyah flinched.

“What?” she exclaimed. Her own voice sounded strangled—small and scared, pitched too high. No. No, this couldn’t be happening. Help the spymaster escape? Zahir couldn’t be serious. It had to be a part of his strange interrogation technique.

“Her?” Kionah asked half a beat later. “Why’s that?”

“In the face of whatever is coming, they would kill her. If Alhena is to be believed—if it’s truly as bad as she claimed.”

“Zahir? Again with the killing?” Aliyah interrupted, aghast. “No. That sort of thing hasn’t been done for decades.”

He crossed his arms, looking heavily unimpressed by her reasoning. “The fact that you are aware of the historical basis is telling. Though, a mere seven or eight decades is a blink of the eye when it comes to history.”

“Okay, look—yes, we know and people joke about it, but…” She winced inwardly at the trace of desperation at the edge of her voice. “It would take a full war for them to start siphoning off lowborns. Even if they’re lowly maidservants.”

“It could well be a war,” she caught him muttering under his breath.

“War? Doubtful. Maidservant though,” Kionah said, suddenly interested. “Oh yes, they’d kill you if it was important. And it will be important.”

“Little Aliyah here is not a true apprentice,” Zahir said. “Thus, the Magicians neither know nor care. They cull based upon living quarters and I do hate to see years of teaching go to waste.”

“Zahir,” she started. “This isn’t—”

“I don’t want you to die,” he snapped, voice suddenly brittle-edged.

He was…stressed, she realised. More stressed than she’d ever heard him, even counting that time the combustible potion had boiled over and he’d burnt the skin off his hands trying to contain it.

Kionah looked at her critically, those frost-pale eyes glinting in appraisal. “So she can heal?”

“Yes. Better than my official apprentices in some aspects.” His demeanour had steadied now. She wasn’t sure how he did it and part of her was indescribably jealous.

“N-not like a real apprentice,” she retorted, flushing self-consciously.

“Can you fight?” Kionah asked.

She hesitated, wondered whether to give a truthful answer. “No.”

Kionah sighed and turned back at Zahir. “Do you have an apprentice who can fight?”

“Not at all. Most of us are a bit pathetic when it comes to blades bigger than a scalpel. And even if I did have an apprentice to your liking, none of them would be susceptible to death via Magician. Aliyah is your best—only—option and I don’t think you’re in a position to be particular.”

“Then yes. I know a way out. To Glister City. If I were unshackled.”

“But—what’s coming?” Aliyah demanded, anxiety surging in her gut, a greasy tangle of fear and unease. “What’s this supposed threat, this thing that supposedly, lives under those mountains?”

Kionah scowled and glared at her with those piercing eyes. “Faeries,” she spat. “A big fat cluster of wild faeries. Not that they‘re the ones you should be afraid of. The Magicians. Soon.”

“I see,” Zahir said. “Well that’s sure to push on the Magician’s buttons.”

He unhooked the nausea-keys from his belt and pressed them into Aliyah’s hand. She tried not to look at the runes and ward-signs, cold and bright and sickening.

“When chaos descended upon the city, you stole these from my office and fled with the prisoner,” he said.

“What?” she asked, horrified.

“Your keys are well-warded,” Kionah said, squinting at them before paling and turning her gaze away.

“Such a shame that the ownership runes don’t fully activate in the hands of those with Healing magic,” Zahir said in an odd, low tone. “Poor fool, that Zahir, for having trusted that lowborn apprenticeling. We’ll have him whipped once he’s recovered from protecting our sorry little kingdom in battle.”

Aliyah flinched. A vision sprang to her mind unbidden, of Zahir lashed to a post, screaming, covered in wounds and bleeding. Rough wood—splintered. Iron ring, rope, lash. A crack in the air, too sharp. Death by Magicians was abstract; whipping was a heavy, real fear that filled her lungs with lead—a real fear, perhaps even for highborn Healers.

“Wh—they’d really whip you?” she asked. “You?”

“No,” Zahir said. “Yes,” said Kionah in the same instant.

The keys felt cold and heavy in her hand, like a dead fish. “And you want me to flee the kingdom with a—some stranger?”

“I’m the best stranger you’re going to get,” Kionah murmured.

“I can’t—this is treason,” she hissed. “They’ll kill me, Zahir. They absolutely will. You can’t be serious.”

“They’ll kill you anyway,” he said, completely serious.

“Y-you’re both certain it will be that bad,” she said. The shock had washed over her by now, and the sensation of something dull and heavy had come to rest in the pit of her stomach.

“The Magicians move,” Kionah said. She stared at the ceiling with bitter eyes. “Swallow the keys if you must; they will not give you time to pack.”

“Why wait then, if it’s so horrible?” she demanded. “Why not run now?”

“One,” Zahir said, “I don’t want to be implicated for treason or incurable stupidity. And two, the guards and Magicians aren’t going to be in one easy-to-avoid location until they’ve got wind of trouble and have headed there, after all the sacrifices are in place. As of now, there are eyes all over the sands.”

“So can’t I—I don’t know, can’t I hide in a cupboard until then?”

“You risk them sending a Magician after you if you’re found conveniently missing from your bed,” Kionah murmured. “Though I loathe to admit it, your master is correct—the worst way is the only way.” She swore under her breath. “I don’t like it any more than you do. Too many moving parts.”

“So you’re saying…you’re saying I have to let myself be captured and escape from a bunch of Magicians who all want to kill me before coming down here and breaking the prisoner out? And—faeries? Real ones? Like—like in the fucking festival plays?” Her words were coming out in a tumble and she was starting to hyperventilate.

She caught herself and forced her breathing to slow. Inhale—ignore the underlying stench of blood, hold and count to three. Exhale the bad memories—cleanse the lungs of the blood-scent, two three. Repeat.

“Well when you put it like that, it sounds quite bad, really,” Zahir said. “But after they lock you into a room or something, they’ll probably leave and head out to fight right away. You can escape then. It’s only if things get really bad that they come back to start exsanguinating you all.”

“But—if I help her, they’ll kill me,” she said. “I’ll get caught…the courts remember the thing with the Library. I can’t mess up again. To go so far as treason—they’ll do what they did with—with the princess, on the salt, with all the blood—I can’t—”

Inhale, now. Hold it—one, two, three. And out, again. It wasn’t helping nearly as much as she needed it to.

“Yes,” Zahir replied, frustration bleeding into his tone. “Which is why you help her and then you leave.”

“What—?” she half-yelled, shaking and terrified and outraged all at once. He was saying to—to betray the kingdom, to leave Shadowsong? All to aid a foreign spymaster? For star’s sake—for all that she’d been born here, she’d barely been outside of the main market square. “What kind of secret treasonous plan is this? You’re going to send me off with her to—where, exactly? You won’t even tell me?”

“Glister City,” Kionah broke in.

“What if—what if I just say no?” she asked.

Zahir pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled, a sharp hiss. “Then you’ll probably die. Hellgods, Aliyah, isn’t it clear to you?”

“You don’t know that,” she snapped. “You’re using historical mythology to get me to do what you want. You could both be court conspirators for all I know. This could just be one big joke.”

“How, exactly, does this benefit me?” he asked. “I’m a bloody Healer. The current state of the kingdom suits me just fine. You think I’ve dragged you down here for what, political kicks?”

“I don’t know!”

“I don’t particularly care if Lady Kionah dies,” he said suddenly. “But you would, wouldn’t you?”

“Wh-what?” she asked, unnerved by his sudden change of topic. Her heart felt as though it had dropped through the bottom of her stomach.

“Clearly, you don’t quite believe me when I say the Magicians will kill you. Put all that aside for a moment. You do believe that they will kill Lady Kionah here? Eventually?”

Kionah made a strangled sound, halfway between a cough and a sob.

“I—I…” She clutched the keys in her hand, the metal edges digging into her palm. She could feel her pulse in her ears, resonating.

“Did those wounds look like a joke to you, Aliyah?” he asked quietly. “Cutting down into fat, almost to deep fascia. Do you think they’re messing around? Think they’ll get their answers and just let her go?”

“I—you want me to…”

“You’re free to look Lady Kionah in the eye and then walk away,” he said. “I can’t stop you from doing that.”

Lady Kionah started to laugh, a stuttering, hiccup-y laugh that sounded like it only existed to distract from the tears welling up in her eyes.

“Well?” he asked, still staring at her head-on. He didn’t even glance at the spymaster, bloodstained and weeping on the torture-table. “You can let the Magicians kill her. But unless I’ve been very wrong about you, I don’t think that you will.”

Aliyah looked at Kionah for several moments, felt needles of cold prickling at the back of her neck, running up her spine to slink into the back of her throat. She ground her teeth together and tried not to choke on the lingering tang of blood in the air.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, please—please stop crying. I’ll help you.”

“Much—much obliged.” Kionah said, and kept cry-laughing under her breath. Aliyah could hardly fault her for it.

“Thank you for your assistance, Lady Kionah. My apprentice will be in touch.”

Zahir closed his sound-shielding apparatus—the air temperature warmed and settled—and strode to the door. His robes flared in his wake, a crest of red as bright as fresh blood.

She stood frozen for a moment by Lady Kionah’s side, reeling from the abruptness of it all, how neatly she’d been maneuvered into a corner, the murky implications looming ahead. Zahir kept walking. She wondered how many people had seen him this way, a fleeting and fading salvation.

She hurried after him and realised that to Kionah, she might look very much the same.