sunlight. Amongst them, between spaces in the smoke, a sudden dark motion. Something falling towards him.
He gazed at it, mesmerized by its spinning flight.
He was shocked by a sudden impact. Began to choke again on a sharp taste of blood. His vision faded into itself, fixed blurrily upon the sun or something else that burned just as brightly. Then, even that faded to nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rites of Passage His snoring woke her early that morning. The light was still grey in the crack between the curtains hanging over the one small window of the bedroom. The air of the room was still, and stank of sex. Reese lay there in the dimness, watching Los sleep: the thin creases on his cheek against the feather pillow, his boyish open pout as he breathed, his blond lashes. She considered waking him with a probing hand in his lap. Some love play to ease the tightness in her chest, the anxiety coursing in her blood. But she made no move.
Instead, Reese studied the beams of the ceiling, and tried to make sense of her dreams of her son until the room became infiltrated by the first warming tones of the sun. Then she rose in silence.
She opened the back door and let the cats into the kitchen, simply to fill the cottage with some life, and pretended annoyance as they curled around her bare ankles as she washed and prepared herself for the day ahead. Los had stopped snoring now that she was up and about. She picked up his discarded clothes, reeking of wine and fragrances and smoke, and went out to the yard and threw them in a wooden tub next to the big stone trough full of rainwater which she would use to wash them later.
Birds sang out their rich melodies above the dumb clucking of the chickens. From out of the east, the fan of daylight was spreading into the sky above the trees and the swathes of canegrass standing still in the breathless morning. Reese stood with one arm cocked and a fist on her hip, looking out over it all. She tried to think of nothing. She wished only to breathe in the soft clarity of the world as it rose from the memory of night, and with that clarity dispel the nameless sorrows that had come to her in the form of her dreaming. She felt tense, as though she would cry if only she would allow herself to.
Inside again, Reese busied herself with chores until she came to Nico's room. She opened the rickety door with its pale scratches at waist height, and glanced about her on the floor of the empty room for something to pick up or straighten out or put away, until she stopped, and put a fist to her hip again, and wondered what she was doing.
I have become like Cole's mother, she thought in annoyance. Banging my stick at the silent walls all night long, to scare away mice that no one else can hear or see any sign of.
Reese could not recall when she had last entered this room. She hadn't felt sure what to do with it since Nico had run off to live in the city, whether to leave it be and allow herself the hope that he might some day return to her, if only for a short visit, or whether to face a harsher reality, one that Los had been keen to impose on her since Nico had departed with the farlander – and now her own dreams too, it seemed – that her only son was gone, and gone for good.
The room was bare beyond the mere absence of Nico's belongings. It had never remained this clean and tidy when he had lived here, though he had, to his credit, been tidy enough. A few things of his still remained: his tin bird whistle on top of the windowsill, which he had lost long ago and she had found again after he had left; next to it some smooth, mottled pebbles from a streambed; his fishing rod and tackle propped in the corner, in their canvas wrapping. The bed was made as Nico himself had left it so long ago; the edges of the sheets tucked into the straw mattress, folded over the pillow.
Dust everywhere, though, she saw now as she looked long and proper.
Reese hurried out and filled a pail with water and vinegar and returned to her son's room and began to wipe everything clean. She worked until her forehead was greasy with sweat and the sun had risen above the line of trees visible through the watery window glass. Occasionally the urge to cry welled up in her again, and she would work all the harder until it had passed, her knees aching as she washed the creaking boards of the floor, her back complaining as she stretched to reach the beams of the low ceiling. She left the sweeping until last; on lifting Nico's few belongings to brush beneath them, she was sure to place them back precisely as they had been before.
At last Reese straightened up, wiping the damp curls away from her face with the back of her hand. She stood and scrutinized the polished surfaces until she was satisfied the room was properly clean.
The window faced her, now bright with sunlight.
Reese unlatched it and pushed open the frame, and stood back with her hands clasped together as though she was waiting for something to enter. A moment passed, and then a sudden breeze blew into the room, and Reese inhaled deep and long as the morning air caressed her face and filled her lungs from the bright world beyond.
'My son,' she whispered, as tears ran inexplicably down her face.
*
A body lay naked on the marble altar, its arms folded neatly on its chest. Its eyes were closed.
The corpse had been ritually cleansed by the grim, silent priests of the Mortarus, the secretive death cult of the Mannian order. For an hour they had carefully sponged the body with cloths bleached white by the bile of living sand eels – the same bile that had whitened their priestly robes, their stiff masks, the banners of Mann that hung on the high walls around them. In the silence of the Temple the bright cloths had been dipped into a bowl of blood-warm water, the ripples disturbing the fresh petals drifting around the brim, the cloths raised dripping into the air and throttled almost dry in fists. With a hiss of ritual words the priests had then drawn the cloths across the lifeless skin.
When this work was complete, and the priests of the Mortarus departed in a shuffling procession of chants and rustling robes, a scent of wild lotus lingered about the corpse, and the wound across its neck had been stitched, a black line barely noticeable beneath their skilful applications of paste and powder. They had been unable to do anything about the expression fixed to the corpse's face though.
It was this that Sasheen was finding most difficult to bear.
'What are your commands, Matriarch?' came a soft voice from behind her.
The priest Heelas, Sasheen's personal caretaker, stood a dozen feet from the altar with his head bowed. He kept his eyes fixed on the marble floor, as though unwilling to look at the kneeling form of his Matriarch, or at her mother perched on a wooden stool by her side.
Sasheen did not hear him, though the echoes of his voice lingered, finally whispering their way through her grief.
'What?' she said, in a distant voice.
'You called for me, Matriarch.'
Sasheen wiped a hand across her eyes and, for a moment, her vision cleared. She took in the still form of her son as though for the first time, a mere husk now, empty and bereft of meaning. Only for a moment could she look into his face fixed in a strangled contortion of horror.
Something stirred within her. Her back could be seen to stiffen.
'Stop everything,' she said in a cold whisper.
'Everything, Matriarch?'
'Everything,' she repeated, and there was a rising force to her words, a hard strength that contradicted the weakness of her tears. 'The ports and bridges. All transportation. Fountains. Temples. Entertainments. Business… If a mere beggar reaches out for money, have his hands removed. I want it all to stop, do you hear me?'
Sasheen inhaled a shuddering breath, scenting the lotus in the air. 'My son is dead,' she said, 'and they shall show their respect.'
Caretaker Heelas clenched his hands together, and allowed a few heartbeats to pass before speaking. 'What of the Augere, Matriarch?' he asked carefully.
She had forgotten about the forthcoming week of celebrations.
'Yes,' Sasheen said darkly. 'That, too, all of it. We shall commemorate the Augere at a more fitting time.'
The caretaker's silence was one of stunned astonishment. He remained composed, however, and bowed his flushed head low.
'Is that… all?'
