“What’s your name, Messah?”
Adam opened his mouth, got as far as “My,” when a pair of bare legs wound around his waist. He froze. The Gautaman woman braced herself behind him, draping her hair over his shoulders, placing her face next to his. Pressed against him, she felt like nothing but bones under her robe—like a revenant of the woman whose heart he had pierced in the dark of Venicci’s cabin.
“Michael?” guessed the Tsaazaari woman before introducing herself. “I am Yasmine. And I see you’ve met Raharu—or should I say she’s met you?” The Gautaman woman giggled as Yasmine continued, asking the Messah where he was from. “God’s Grasp? or maybe Pareo?”
“Caethborough, a small village southeast of Castle Aestas,” he answered, excited and terrified. This was not a bath with old women. The naked toes playing about his thighs were supple, the nails sharp. They grabbed and pinched at his sheer silk skirt. He could feel himself rise beneath the thin fabric and knew that they could see it too, that he was a sinner just like them. Yet the feeling seemed deeper, of a breadth and depth beyond mere desire, like something lurking below the surface—a shadowed serpent waiting to emerge. “And my name is Adam, not Michael. I was born in Nuw Gard, but most my life I grew up in Babylon. My father was the pastor there.”
Yasmine gasped, “You came here all the way from Iisah ’s sister tribe? How? And why come to Najmah Janoob? What could a Messah want so badly to risk the Black Beast?” Her questions were endless, but Adam answered as best that he could. “It’s a long story,” he warned them, pouring cups of wine for himself and Yasmine, lighting her hashish pipe while Raharu warmed an opium lamp. It was hours later by the time he finished. Their flagons were empty, their pipes cold. Raharu slept curled like a cat on her cushion while Yasmine sat awake, alert, and enraptured, leaning forward as to catch every word of the Messah’s journey. As he finished, she dabbed at the inky black tears on her cheeks and said, “And now you’re here, a believer in a brothel half a world away from home. All for her, for this Magdalynn.”
Adam nodded, his head light from hashish fumes. “Yes. It’s part of His plan. I don’t understand how it fits together, but I know He wants me to get Mags back to her family. These things that happen along the way, they’re too much to be a coincidence. He must be testing me, making sure I’m ready for…something. Something big, bigger than me, bigger than the church. It’s got to be as big the world. I think the walls around the Bridge of Babylon are truly coming down, and what happens after…I’ll get to see Father again, and my mother, and the whole congregation.”
“I hope that’s true,” replied Yasmine, retrieving a small pile of silver from her purse and pressing it into Adam hands. A dozen thick Mephistine coins. “And I hope you can find the medicine for Magdalynn. You’ll be a good man for her, I know. I’d loved to have you when I was her age. And who knows? Maybe you’ll come back tomorrow and make me young again, if just for an hour.”
Slowed by a mixture of innocence and hashish smoke, it took a moment for the Messah to process her suggestion, and he never fully understood. For on the cusp of comprehension, the boom of authority cut through the music and clamor and conversation. The wrath of the mistress. She jerked aside one of the privacy screens and would have screamed had she not seen Yasmine sitting with him. But that which did not escape her mouth showed full in her throat, blood vessels bulging, tendons taught as rope ready to snap under the pressure building flush in her face. “There you are,” she seethed quietly. Her demeanor softened as she addressed Yasmine, then snapped hard like the crack of a whip. “Come here, quickly, now Messah. You’ve ruined enough of the good lady’s time.”
“Hardly,” replied Yasmine, winking to Adam as the mistress extracted him, Ashaya whispering a hundred bitter curses while dragging Adam into the kitchens.
Out of view of the customers, she laid into him, spraying in his face, “How dare you! You did not say the girl has the Black Devil! And now she shows! If it spreads, the whole house will need to be burned. You must go!” She thrust his sword, his ragged clothes and a tiny purse into his chest—dropped them for him to catch. “There, your payment, double for broken contract as is the law of good Solomon. I will tell Hassan. Now you go! Get the girl and go, and tell no one you were here.” She muttered under her breath in Tsaazaari. Adam thought he heard Yasmine’s name, but he could not even keep up with what the mistress was telling him.
“You’re throwing us out?” he asked, half a slur, his tongue numbed from the wine. Mistress Ashaya’s answer was a frustrated groan and two hands hitting, shoving, slapping, and scratching to get him moving. And he was off, one minute climbing the stairs, the next staring out into the Tsaazaar’s utter darkness, the only light from the hostel windows, the only warmth from the bundle of skin and bones in his arms. And the mistress was right. The Devil had finally revealed himself in the tips of Magdalynn’s fingers and toes, and her nose and lips. They’d blackened like the desert night. There was not much time.
Adam donned his worn linens and strapped on his sword. Money in hand, the girl
