Aliyah

Two years ago

A crooked curl of pain hooked through the flesh below her stomach and latched around the base of her spine.

She shuddered and rested her sweating forehead against cool stone. Breathed slowly. Every inhale felt like an opening for the pain to strike, to squeeze the breath out of her such that she’d never get it back. A groan slipped out from behind gritted teeth.

The worst one yet—or not. Perhaps the worst pain was simply any pain that she was currently experiencing. She thought by now that she’d be used to it. White-hot pins slinking through her pelvis.

Most days, she could barely fly a needle straight. The days where she woke up in a pool of blood, she couldn’t think, could hardly move at all. Days like today. She couldn’t afford this. She was barely earning her keep, as it was.

There was a knock at her door.

“I’m back,” Rana’s voice sailed in from outside. “And I brought the apothecary with me.”

Aliyah opened her eyes.

Rana. Sweet, enviable Rana with her talent at scribery and her complete lack of affliction. Aliyah had wanted to be a scribe too, when she was younger. Then came worsening pains, a useless body and friends who quietly drifted away—all but Rana. At times like these, Aliyah almost resented her. She loathed herself more for daring to resent such a good friend, much less the only one she had left. None of the loathing stopped the pained chant in her head: how dare you flaunt your wellness.

The door opened. The familiar cadence of Rana’s footsteps, followed by a heavier tread. A disgruntled noise and the thump of something being placed onto the tile.

Aliyah turned her head to the sound of her desk chair being dragged over. The apothecary—an ample woman with her hair in a thick, greying braid—plunked herself down.

“This is the Apothecary Yara,” Rana chattered as she set a tray down at Aliyah’s sparse table. “My second-cousin pointed me her way; you know, the one-eyed one, the Magician-to-be. I brought you some tea as well. And I shall put some honey into it too; was it two spoons, you liked?”

“Y-yes. Thank you.”

The apothecary leaned in and peered at her. Aliyah tried not to cough; Yara reeked of old sweat and bitter herbs. Possibly there was also a whiff of alcohol on her breath.

“Well, girl?” Apothecary Yara’s voice was gruff, but not unkind. She had wrinkles around her eyes, like prongs of a bird’s tracks over sand. “What’s paining you? And what’s this here, a basin?”

“She was feeling queasy earlier,” Rana said, her voice all sunshine sympathy.

Queasy didn’t begin to describe it. It had been the sort of nausea brought on by agony alone.

“Lower stomach,” Aliyah gritted out. Bile was rising in her throat with each successive lurch of pain. “Spine, a little bit. It hurts. Gets worse in, ah, cycles—”

The nausea crested. She retched, mouth dry and stomach empty.

Yara raised an eyebrow. “You with child, girl?”

“No.”

Yara shook her head and sighed. “Nay, you can be truthful with me. Us medicine-folk have our ways and don’t tell tales, besides. Really, Rana. You ought to have said so before I packed.”

Rana shook her head. “She’s not.”

“You sure?”

“I am incredibly sure,” Aliyah hissed.

“Hurts enough to have you laying on the ground, hrm?” Yara turned to Rana, who was mixing the tea in the corner. “Ach, Rana, girl. Dragging me all the way up here when naught but a Healer would do.”

Aliyah wasn’t sure whether she wanted to scream or laugh. A Healer? She couldn’t buy a Healer for most of what she owned—she had already tried. Healer Nazeri had sent her away with a dose of deafness for her trouble. The spellwork had worn off within the hour; the memory had not. Nazeri’s visage flashed into her mind, unbidden; her pursed lips, her disdainful gaze, the gaudy pearls at her ears, that hard voice cut off into muffled, panicked silence. Her existing pain flared, flooding back to the forefront of her mind.

Rana cleared her throat delicately. “For the highborns only, remember?”

“A Mender, then. If you had wet-nurses, surely they give you a Mender now.”

“There is one,” Aliyah gritted out. “I saw her many times. She kept saying that I should take more demulcent drops. Last week, she said, ‘your antics do not fool me’ and ‘simple burdens shall be endured with grace’ and some such along those lines. So. I don’t see her anymore.”

Yara shook her head. “Aye, and fool she may be, she had the right to think you were craving for heavy medicines. There’s an art in the asking.”

Another spike of agony drove at her stomach and clawed its way up to the back of her throat.

“Do you think I’m lying?” she spat. Her insides churned, incandescent. “Do you think I would cry through my examinations and resign myself into maidservantry in—in some sort of ploy?”

“Ach, girl. Hush.” Yara made a placating gesture with her hand. “You are clearly pained. I suspect it is an uncommon condition of the inner organs. I do not like to say this, but there is little I can do. Perhaps bribe a Healer.”

“I’ve tried!” Her eyes watered. Healer Nazeri, she thought, and a burning, poorly-hidden loathing seeped in under her tongue. It was useless.

“Mayhaps you tried the wrong one. As I said, there’s an art in the asking.” Yara narrowed her eyes. “You’re of age, yes? Perhaps…arrangements, could be made for special favours—you’ve still got both kidneys, haven’t you? There’s always one or two willing.”

“Kidneys? What?” Awful comprehension dawned; she pictured Nazeri slicing into her. “No.”

Yara gave a pitying bark of laughter at the look on her face. “That’s just how it was back in my day.”

All sense of self-preservation fled her body. “Are you an apothecary, or not?” she snapped.

Rana padded over, bearing a mug of tea. “Shh. My apologies, apothecary. She’s usually…she isn’t her usual self at the moment. Aliyah—here.”

Yara chuckled mirthlessly and muttered something about having seen far worse.

Aliyah gritted her teeth. Rana drew her up, helped her lean against the foot of the bed as she pressed the warm mug into her shaking hands. “It was Healer Nazeri that you asked, yes?”

“Yes—though she used magic to make me leave her be—” She felt her throat close up. She shook her head and sipped at the tea. Rana had been there afterwards, with a quill and parchments at hand until the stuffy buzzing in her ears had worn off.

Rana patted her awkwardly on the arm. “You couldn’t have known. I’ll ask around, see if there’s anyone willing to help. Cousin Karim may know of others.”

“Maybe. Th-thank you.”

“I did not say I could not try,” Yara interrupted. “What are you taking?”

Aliyah winced through another lance of pain. “Taking?”

“Medicines. What medicines did your Mender give you?”

“Uh. Some sort of liniment. Some demulcent drops.”

Yara sighed. “Then I have some real remedies, if you want them and think yourself to be trusted with them.”

Aliyah shut her eyes. Opened them again. Was there really any question to it?

“Please,” she said.

Yara gave her a searching, almost pitying look. “Nine crescents per hundred, that’s as low as I go. I’ll take coppers too, if you’re out of crescents.”

“Rana, could you help me get my money pouch? In the desk.” She doubted standing was possible. She would rather lie down again, come to think of it.

Rana, star’s blessings be upon her, fetched the pouch and started counting out a mix of silver crescents and copper chimes. Yara reached down for her apothecary kit, a creaking leather carcass of a bag. She selected a bottle and pressed it into Aliyah’s limp hand.

“Take three per day at most with four-hour intervals, or your liver will melt. If you need more, Rana knows my shop. All these stairs are no good on my knees.” She paused, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Best of luck, girl. I’ll ask the stars that you won’t need to buy from me again.”

Aliyah had asked the stars herself, many times. Eventually, she’d stopped counting the times she’d fainted from the pain—and she’d stopped asking.

===

The painkillers worked.

She rationed them carefully, for days that she signed up for heavier work. She wasn’t stuck sewing in the laundry hall anymore. She could do washing and mopping for more money, could walk further from her quarters without worrying about collapsing. She drank iced tea with casual acquaintances of the sewing circle, ones polite enough to not mock the way she savoured every drop and chewed on the ice afterwards, for good measure. Rana took her to the market, where they bought little skewers of freshly-fried, syrup-soaked dough balls and ate them out in the sun.

And yet, it wasn’t enough.

There were still days when three pills couldn’t help, days that she had to call off her shifts, after which her fellow maidservants would give her dirty looks.

Lazy lass, she heard them murmur amongst themselves. To them, she was a needless dead weight: bringing down the quotas, another one who claimed illness while she went down to market or frolicked with a lover. What was the point of correcting them? This wasn’t something that was talked about. It would be less mortifying if she were walking around with a broken leg, or bleeding from a weeping gash in her throat. At least there was a sort of respectability in other kinds of suffering. Her ears burned with shame when one of the other maids asked—and she had asked kindly, too, as far as she could tell—why she always seemed so unwell.

There were still days that she spent shaking in bed with a spell-warmed pillow while Rana and her scribe friends went out and walked around and breathed without fear of collapsing on the exhale.

Rana said she was still sending out queries on Healers, spoken histories and hushed testimonies. She’d had no luck so far. Many of them asked for samples of tissue, or marrow, or worse. Rana reluctantly passed along an old account of Healer Octans taking a whole eye, plucked out to be put into a jar of embalming fluid for stars-knows-what purpose; perhaps simply as a perverse pleasure. Healer Meleph had seemed promising, until a whispered confession from another scribe revealed that he had asked for a kidney in exchange for fixing a crooked spine. She was starting to think that coin meant nothing to them.

There were others with similar troubles: a sickly girl at the fishmonger’s stall, a blacksmith who could not work some days. Though whether it was some curse of being born an unfortunate bastard or her own selfishness, it seemed that of all these rare stories, hers was the worst.

Or perhaps, a dark little voice whispered to her, perhaps your story seems the worst because anyone with a story worse than yours has already died of it.

A month passed. Then a season. Verging on two.

The longer she waited, the worse the pain got; invisible claws sinking into every bit of soft tissue they could find. A hateful disease, clotting and curdling and crushing her into dust. Wait a season, a year or two more, and who knew what would befall her? It gnawed at her now, the not-knowing: was it merely torment, or could it kill her, given enough time?

There had been moments, fleeting moments, in the throes of the worst pain where she had wished for a quick death. She did not truly want to die, not after the trouble she had put herself through, all her hopes hinging upon the mercy of a fucking highborn. The pain, the indignity; it felt as if ants were crawling beneath her skin now that she could see the wisp of a way out.

What was it that the arithmetic tutor had tried to teach them, so long ago? Logarithms and…exponentials? Yes, the slow start and then the hard, fast rise. An exponential malady. She was losing more blood these days. She caught glimpses of herself in other people’s looking-glasses, greying at the edges, face gone gaunt. Strong tea helped with the constant exhaustion, but it was expensive. She sent for more painkillers, of course. Rana must have said something to Yara about her, because a packet of iron salts had come with her latest order. There had been a handwritten note enclosed, saying to sprinkle a pinch over each morning meal. She wondered how much time it would buy her.

She took to walking the castle gardens on her days off, hoping that the fresh air would strengthen her constitution. She avoided the crop-growing portions; most of the apprentice Weathermancers were too pretty, too charming, and too far above her station. That was dangerous ground for a sickly maidservant to tread.

Worse yet were the apprentice Healers; not for their friendliness, no—but for the way they clumped together in bundles of red-cloaked secrecy. They lounged in the gardens, perched about like well-groomed songbirds. They spoke amongst themselves and made notes on rolls of fresh parchment. She didn’t dare to sit close enough to overhear; Healer Nazeri’s hearing hex had been warning enough.

A slow, bitter resentment gripped her as she watched them take their luncheons from a safe distance—as bitter and as dry as a pill on the tongue. Rana had looked into a few of the more promising higher-years. Apprentices weren’t allowed to take bribes, both officially and unofficially.

No doubt it still happened, Rana said, though only amongst their sort of circle.

Highborns, the lot of them; non-bastard children with expensive tutors and whispered contacts to net them a place. Highborns who already had Healers at their beck and call, who surely didn’t even need to know how to make things stop hurting.

Well, she amended, there would have been a few who had tested in; Rana’s cousin Karim had received the option of Healership right below his choice of Magicianship. But that opportunity was long gone for her. She hadn’t had money for medicine before the scionborn examinations and she couldn’t retake them now that she did.

She glanced over at the little crowds of red as she picked at her lunch. Healer apprentices chattered over their saffron-spiced rice, giggling over some joke or other. Their meals were paired with cuts of meat; hers was plain and unadorned but for a few scraps of vegetables and a ladleful of sauce. She could afford more now that she could work more, she knew. But there was the bribe to think of, a soft, clinking tick at the back of her mind. She kept it there next to the memory of Healer Nazeri. More silver coins to be squirrelled away to exchange for golden crowns, of which she had so few. It wouldn’t do to waste more than necessary on luxuries.

Giggling and chattering floated over the flowerbeds, rasped at her ears like dull knives. Then again, she thought with extra bite, surely some of it couldn’t be that difficult if apprentices could afford to laugh so idly. Numbing a pain didn’t sound nearly as daunting as fixing a crooked spine or a failing organ; if she could learn just this one thing, then she could earn a measure of relief. She wasn’t as disgustingly smart as Rana’s cousin, but she wasn’t stupid, either. What made them better than her, aside from being highborn?

She set down her cutlery. She had a clearer head for reading now. Why waste it?

===

The Lower Library was open to all who dwelled within the palace, for a fee. She paid two silver crescents to the sour-faced librarian at the front desk for a month’s access. She was given a borrowing card and what was apparently a catalogue; surprisingly small and slim, enough that she hoped that there was a magnifying lens attached to the inner cover.

She went while Rana was out with her scribe friends. She knew Rana; Rana would worry.

Rana would tell her to wait, that she had a good feeling about this next lead. And Rana was a good friend, a wonderful friend that she doubted she even deserved. So it hurt all the more when she seethed at how little choice she had in the matter. Because Rana was the one with connections, was the one who knew who to talk to and how to talk to them. Yara’s words flashed through her head, there’s an art in the asking. Rana was the one who could do things. She’d always been, ever since they were small children. Aliyah hadn’t even started minding until the debilitating pains had started, leaving her with nothing at all—not even the ability to follow. It was like being dragged along like a dead weight, a corpse in the making.

These days, Rana was always smarter, always luckier, always better. Known progenitor, a wanted child, a sponsored scribehood placed into her hands. Rana was doing it all for her, she knew, but that didn’t make the glimpse of freedom any easier to bear. She wanted to be the one to close her fist around the answer. She wanted to be brave enough to say: fine, if the Healers won’t help me, I’ll do it myself.

She had never been inside the Lower Library before, only heard things about it—Rana’s constant comments on the vomit-coloured carpet held merit after all. There were a staggering nine levels to the place, which shouldn’t have been possible, seeing as there was a stack of guest rooms on the level just above it. Aliyah, of all people, should know; she’d been dusting them just the other week. Thus, the Lower Library was a true magical archive, even if it seemed otherwise unremarkable; the wallpaper was plain, the shelves stood in dull lines, and the air smelled harshly of fresh-cut papers.

The main floor was filled with golden-cloaked Librarians bustling about; she hurried up the stairs to quieter levels. A few off-duty scribes here and there; some of them were actually asleep, face-down in their notebooks. She found herself an unoccupied reading room, full of oversized, almond-patterned armchairs and fashionable-looking but inconveniently low-set tables. When she sat herself down on one of the chairs, its plushness threatened to engulf her. Between the awkward furniture and the unsightly carpet, she felt ill-at-ease. The place felt odd, in a muddled, sleepy sort of way. It’s very characteristics meant that it inched over the threshold of eccentricity and into the realm of continuous, passively noticeable discomfort. It felt tiring to simply exist in.

Still, she wasn’t here to enjoy herself. She flipped open her little catalogue, expecting pages of cramped, minuscule text. Instead, out sprouted a hand of blue light. The hand floated over the false-book, palm-up and holding a symbol, a single word: ask.

“I…ah, I wish to search for texts on healing?” she ventured, feeling foolish. She was speaking to a spell. What looked like a fairly sophisticated spell, yes, but a spell nonetheless.

The hand turned and pointed. She tilted the book around, experimenting; the hand swayed and spun upon its axis to keep pointing in the same direction. She held the catalogue out, extricated herself from the armchair, and followed.

She found nothing of use.

There wasn’t so much as a sliver of parchment on healing techniques. Oh, there were mentions of healing, alright; transcribed historical accounts of medical miracles, but never a word on how they were achieved. There were also plenty of chronicles that waxed on about the Songian secrets of true healing and true Healers; boasts about how no other kingdom or continent had come close, for there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of so-called magical secrets passed on from master to apprentice. One chronicler waxed on at length about mysterious, ancient ways which couldn’t be found by merely reading books or cutting bodies open and looking around inside. At these passages, her heart sank; but it was no use giving up hope just yet.

‘Many writers are either lying, wrong, or both,’ as her old history tutor used to say. Chroniclers were only ordinary people, after all. And if she’d learned anything from the talk at the sewing circles, it was that some ordinary people waded through their lives being confidently incorrect. Even if such Healer secrets were absolutely necessary, surely some of the lesser secrets were written down somewhere. The numbing of pains sounded so basic. She’d been counting on that when she went looking in the Library.

A dangerous thought slid into her head: maybe she was looking in the wrong Library.

Oh.

Oh no.

Another Library? The other Library? That was a bad idea—possibly the worst.

Everyone heard things about the Higher Library: that it held things other than books, that it was infinite in certain directions, that a tribe of crocodile-people lived in its depths. No one that she had ever heard speak of it had ever actually been inside. It also seemed that maidservants and even matrons were considered too lowborn to clean the interior; it was said that the first few years of a Higher Library scribe were spent with one’s hand around a broom rather than upon a runequill.

She knew where the Higher Library was. She’d walked past the front doors once or twice on the way to help clean a highborn’s quarters; they were great big polished slabs set into a grand archway, not unlike the entrance to a typical large hall. There was nothing to distinguish it but a large brass plaque at about eye-height that read ‘Higher Library – authorised entry only’.

Entry couldn’t be bought. Everyone knew that. Though people had snuck in before. Interesting news traveled fast. The sewing circles ate it up.

The place was unstable, people said. Easy to rip a backdoor in parts. Yes, they were patching it, but new faults opened up all the time. So-and-so’s little brother took a jaunt there and back just last month, didn’t you hear? He didn’t get caught, not officially, but he did bring back a little glowing book as proof. They’d seen it with their own eyes; full of unnatural symbols and obscene illustrations. His mother had forced him to burn it and sent him to live out of the castle for his safety. But there were ways. Always, there were ways; the circles indulged in hushed speculation. That boy was not the first, nor would he be the last.

Why couldn’t she do the same? Just a little look around.

It was an absurd notion. Even if she could open a door, how could she possibly find what she was looking for? The place was huge. There were Librarians about. The wise thing to do would be to have patience and to hold out for the opportunity to bribe a real Healer.

She let her head fall against the polished wooden surface of the reading desk, propped high with books that had nothing about healing methods in any of them. Nothing, even, about useful chemicals or potions or painkillers to treat her malady.

A Healer’s office would have better books, but breaking in would be a death wish. Those quarters were far smaller than the allegedly infinite Higher Library, and they’d be crawling with wards with no secret exits to speak of. Most maidservants weren’t even assigned to rooms that high-up; she’d accompanied a matron to clean the bathroom of a mere Higher Scribe’s quarters once, and he’d kept a wary eye on them the entire time. No, a Healer would be even more diligent. Perhaps she could break into an apprentice’s quarters and rifle through their notes? But that was a similar situation with lower quality resources.

Nothing for it, then: what was in the Higher Library?

The very idea was brazen and stupid. But stupider things had happened throughout history. She only wanted to learn one thing. This wasn’t nearly as stupid as that one diplomatic incident of the pet peacock that had drowned in a duck pond and launched a year-long propaganda campaign against their Glisterian allies.

She reopened the catalogue.