Black Halo

air like an executioner’s axe as he scraped another patch of skin smooth.

‘Recompensed.’

‘What?’

‘If it was to be returned, you would just give me the same poem back. To recompense the gift means that you would give me one of your own.’

The man stopped, tapped the razor against his chin and hummed thoughtfully. Placing a hand against his mouth, he cleared his throat.

‘There once was an urchin from Allssaq-’

‘Stop,’ she interrupted, holding a hand up. ‘Sometimes, too, gifts can just be from one person to another without reprisal.’

‘Recompense.’

‘In this case, I believe my word fits better.’ She drew her robe about her body, staring at him in the mirror and frowning. ‘The sun is still sleeping, I am sure. You don’t have to go yet.’

‘That’s not your decision,’ the man said, ‘nor mine.’

‘It doesn’t strike you as worrisome that your decisions are not your own?’

Anacha immediately regretted the words, knowing that he could just as easily turn the question back upon her. She carefully avoided his stare, turning her gaze toward the door that she would never go beyond, the halls that led to the desert she would never see again.

To his credit, Bralston remained silent.

‘You can go in late, can’t you?’ she pressed, emboldened.

Quietly, she slipped behind him, slinking arms around his waist and pulling him close to her. She breathed deeply of his aroma, smelling the night on him. His scent, she had noticed, lingered a few hours behind him. When he came to her in the evening, he smelled of the markets and sand in the outside world. When he left her in the morning, he smelled of this place, her prison of silk and sunlight.

It was only when the moon rose that she smelled him and herself, their perfumes mingled as their bodies had been the night before. She smelled a concoction on him, a brew of moonlight and whispering sand on a breeze as rare as orchids. This morning, his scent lingered a little longer than usual and she inhaled with breath addicted.

‘Or skip it altogether,’ she continued, drawing him closer. ‘The Venarium can go a day without you.’

‘And they frequently do,’ he replied, his free hand sliding down to hers.

She felt the electricity dance upon his skin, begging for his lips to utter the words that would release it. It was almost with a whimper that her hand was forced from his waist as he returned to shaving.

‘Today was going to be one such day. The fact that it is not means that I cannot miss it.’ He shaved off another line of lather. ‘Meetings at this hour are not often called in the Venarium.’ He shaved off another. ‘Meetings of the Librarians at this hour are never called.’ He slid the last slick of lather from his scalp and flicked it into the basin. ‘If the Librarians are not seen-’

‘Magic collapses, laws go unenforced, blood in the streets, hounds with two heads, babies spewing fire.’ She sighed dramatically, collapsing onto her cushion and waving a hand above her head. ‘And so on.’

Bralston spared her a glance as she sprawled out, robe opening to expose the expanse of naked brown beneath. The incline of his eyebrows did not go unnoticed, though not nearly to the extent of his complete disregard as he walked to his clothes draped over a chair. That, too, did not cause her to stir so much as the sigh that emerged from him as he ran a hand over his trousers.

‘Are you aware of my duty, Anacha?’

She blinked, not entirely sure how to answer. Few people were truly aware of what the Venarium’s ‘duties’ consisted. If their activities were any indication, however, the wizardly order’s tasks tended to involve the violent arrest of all palm-readers, fortune-tellers, sleight-of-hand tricksters, and the burning, electrocution, freezing or smashing of said charlatans and their gains.

Of the duties of the Librarians, the Venarium’s secret within a secret, no one could even begin to guess, least of all her.

‘Let me rephrase,’ Bralston replied after her silence dragged on for too long. ‘Are you aware of my gift?’

He turned to her, crimson light suddenly leaking out of his gaze, and she stiffened. She had long ago learned to tremble before that gaze, as the charlatans and false practitioners did. A wizard’s stink eye tended to be worse than anyone else’s, if only by virtue of the fact that it was shortly followed by an imminent and messy demise.

‘That’s all it is: a gift,’ he continued, the light flickering like a flame. ‘And gifts require recompense. This’ — he tapped a thick finger to the corner of his eye — ‘is only given to us so long as we respect it and follows its laws. Now, I ask you, Anacha, when was the last time Cier’Djaal was a city of law?’

She made no reply for him; she knew none was needed. And as soon as he knew that she knew, the light faded. The man that looked at her now was no longer the one that had come to her the night before. His brown face was elegantly lined by wrinkles, his pursed lips reserved for words and chants, not poems.

Anacha stared at him as he dressed swiftly and meticulously, tucking tunic into trousers and draping long, red coat over tunic. He did not check in a mirror, the rehearsed garbing as ingrained into him as his gift, as he walked to the door to depart without a sound.

There was no protest as he left the coins on her wardrobe. She had long ago told him there was no need to pay anymore. She had long ago tried to return the coins to him when he left. She had shrieked at him, cursed him, begged him to take the coins and try to pretend that they were two lovers who had met under the moonlight and not a client and visitor who knew each other only in the confines of silk and perfume.

He left the coins and slipped out the door.

And she knew she had to be content to watch him go, this time, as all other times. She had to watch the man she knew the night before reduced to his indentation on her bed, his identity nothing more than a faint outline of sweat on sheets and shape on a cushion. The sheets would be washed, the cushion would be smoothed; Bralston the lover would die in a whisper of sheets.

Bralston the Librarian would do his duty, regardless.

‘Do you have to do that?’ the clerk asked.

Bralston allowed his gaze to linger on the small statuette for a moment. He always spared enough time for the bronze woman: her short-cropped, businesslike hair, her crook in one hand and sword in the other as she stood over a pack of cowering hounds. Just as he always spared the time to touch the corner of his eye in recognition as he passed the statue in the Venarium’s halls.

‘Do what?’ the Librarian replied, knowing full well the answer.

‘This is not a place of worship, you know,’ the clerk muttered, casting a sidelong scowl at his taller companion. ‘This is the Hall of the Venarium.’

‘And the Hall of the Venarium is a place of law,’ Bralston retorted, ‘and the law of Cier’Djaal states that all businesses must bear an icon of the Houndmistress, the Law-Bringer.’

‘That doesn’t mean you have to worship her as a god.’

‘A sign of respect is not worship.’

‘It borders dangerously close to idolatry,’ the clerk said, attempting to be as threatening as a squat man in ill-fitting robes could be. ‘And that certainly is.’

Technically, Bralston knew, it wasn’t so much against the law as it was simply psychotic in the eyes of the Venarium. What would be the point of worshipping an idol, after all? Idols were the hypocrisy of faith embodied, representing things so much more than mankind and contrarily hewn in the image of mankind. What was the point of it all?

Gods did not exist, in man’s image or no. Mankind existed. Mankind was the ultimate power in the world and the wizards were the ultimate power within mankind. These idols merely reinforced that fact.

Still, the Librarian lamented silently as he surveyed the long hall, one might credit idolatry with at least being more aesthetically pleasing.

The bronze statuette was so small as to be lost amidst the dun-coloured stone walls and floors, unadorned by rugs, tapestries or any window greater than a slit the length of a man’s hand. It served as the only thing to make one realise they were in a place of learning and law, as opposed to a cell.

Still, he mused, there was a certain appeal to hearing one’s footsteps echo through the halls. Perhaps that was the architectural proof to the wizards’ denial of gods. Here, within the Venarium itself, in the halls where no