Black Halo

‘No,’ the voice spoke, more threatening than comforting. ‘No, you won’t.’

The seawater flooded into his mouth and he found not the will to push it out. The world changed from blue to black as he drifted into darkness on a haunting echo.

‘I won’t let you.’

Three

ONE THOUSAND PAPER WINGS

Poets, she had often suspected, were supposed to have beautiful dreams: silhouettes of women behind silk, visions of gold that blinded their closed eyes, images of fires so bright they should take the poet’s breath away before she could put them to paper.

Anacha dreamt of cattle.

She dreamt of shovelling stalls and milking cows. She dreamt of wheat and of rice in shallow pools, dirty feet firmly planted in mud, ugly cotton breeches hiked up to knobby knees as grubby hands rooted around in filth. She dreamt of a time when she still wore such ugly clothing instead of the silks she wore now, when she covered herself in mud instead of perfume.

Those were the good dreams.

The nightmares had men clad in the rich robes of money-lenders, their brown faces red as they yelled at her father and waved debtor’s claims. They had her father helpless to resist as he signed his name on the scrolls and the men, with their soft and uncallused hands, helped her into a crate with silk walls. She would dream of her tears mingling with the bathwater as women, too old to be of any desire for clients, scrubbed the mud from her rough flesh and the calluses from her feet.

She used to have nightmares every night. She used to cry every night.

That was before Bralston.

Now she dreamed of him often, the night she met him, the first poem she ever read. It was painted upon her breasts and belly as she was ordered into her room to meet a new client, her tears threatening to make the dye run.

‘Do not cry,’ the older women had hissed, ‘this is a member of the Venarium. A wizard. Do what you do, do it well. Wizards are as generous with their gold as they are with their fire and lightning.’

She couldn’t help but cry the moment the door closed behind her and she faced him: broad-shouldered, slender of waist, with not a curl of hair upon his head. He had smiled at her, even as she cried, had taken her to the cushion they would sit upon for many years and had read the poetry on her skin. He would read for many days before he finally claimed what he paid for.

By then, he needn’t take it.

She began to yearn for him in her sleep, rolling over to find his warm brown flesh in her silk sheets. To find an empty space where he should be wasn’t something she was unused to; a strict schedule was required to keep his magic flowing correctly, as he often said. To find her fingers wrapping about a scrap of paper, however, was new.

Fearing that he had finally left her the farewell note she lived in perpetual terror of, she opened her eyes and unwrapped her trembling fingers from the parchment. Fear turned to surprise as she saw the slightly wrinkled form of a paper crane sitting in her palm, its crimson painted eyes glaring up at her, offended at her fingers wrinkling its paper wings. Without an apology for it, she looked around her room, and surprise turned to outright befuddlement.

In silent flocks, the cranes had perched everywhere: on her bookshelf, her nightstand, her washbasin, her mirror, all over her floors. They stared down at her with wary, blood-red eyes, their beaks folded up sharply in silent judgement.

So dense they were, she might never have found him amongst the flocks if not for the sound of his fingers diligently folding another. He straightened up from his squat on her balcony, casting a glower over his bare, brown back.

‘That wasn’t precisely easy to fold, you know,’ he said.

She started, suddenly realising she still held the wrinkled paper crane in her hand. Doing her best to carefully readjust the tiny creature, she couldn’t help but notice the unnatural smoothness to the parchment. Paper was supposed to have wrinkles, she knew, tiny little edges of roughness. That paper had character, eager to receive the poet’s brush.

This paper … seemed to resent her touching it.

‘None of these could have been easy to fold,’ Anacha said, placing the crane down carefully and pulling her hand away with a fearful swiftness that she suspected must have looked quite silly. ‘How long have you been up?’

‘Hours,’ Bralston replied.

She peered over his pate to the black sky beyond, just now beginning to turn blue.

‘It’s not yet dawn,’ she said. ‘You always get fussy if you don’t sleep enough.’

‘Anacha,’ he sighed, his shoulders sinking. ‘I am a hunter of heretic wizards. I enforce the law of Venarie through fire and frost, lightning and force. I do not get fussy.’

He smiled, paying little attention to the fact that she did not return the expression. She was incapable of smiling now, at least not in the way she had the first night she had met him.

‘This is a lovely poem,’ he had said, as she lay on the bed before him. ‘Do you like poetry?’

She had answered with a stiff nod, an obedient nod scrubbed and scolded into her. He had smiled.

‘What’s your favourite?’

When she had no reply, he had laughed. She had felt the urge to smile, if only for the fact that it was as well-known that wizards didn’t laugh as it was that they drank pulverised excrement and ate people’s brains for the gooey knowledge contained within.

‘Then I will bring you poetry. I am coming back in one week.’ Upon seeing her confused stare, he rolled his shoulders. ‘My duty demands that I visit Muraska for a time. Do you know where it is?’ She shook her head; he smiled. ‘It’s a great, grey city to the north. I’ll bring you a book from it. Would you like that?’

She nodded. He smiled and rose, draping his coat about him. She watched him go, the sigil upon his back shrinking as he slipped out the door. Only when it was small as her thumb did she speak and ask if she would see him again. He was gone then, however, the door closing behind him.

And the urge to smile grew as faint then as it was now.

‘This is … for work, then?’ she asked, the hesitation in her voice only indicative that she knew the answer.

‘This is for my duty, yes,’ he corrected as he set aside another paper crane and plucked up another bone-white sheet. ‘Librarian helpers, I call them. My helpful little flocks.’

She plucked up the crane beside her delicately in her hand, stared into its irritated little eyes. The dye was thick, didn’t settle on the page as proper ink should. It was only when the scent of copper filled her mouth that she realised that this paper wasn’t meant for ink.

‘You … This is,’ she gasped, ‘your blood?’

‘Some of it, yes.’ He held up a tiny little vial with an impressive label, shook it, then set in a decidedly large pile. ‘I ran out after the four hundredth one. Fortunately, I’ve been granted special privileges for this particular duty, up to and including the requisition of a few spare pints.’

Anacha had long ago learned that wizards did laugh and that they rarely did anything relatively offensive to brains from those not possessing their particular talents. Their attitude towards other bodily parts and fluids, however, was not something she ever intended to hear about without cringing.