‘Are you really a cultist?’ Lan asked.
‘How else, young lady, do you think it happens? Say a prayer in a Jorsalir church?’ He chuckled softly.
A thunder of applause erupted from the distance, a reminder that time was passing, that she’d soon need to be on stage. One more act before her own, and she didn’t have long… She might never see this man again.
‘Look, I really need to know something,’ she said. ‘You say you can change humans, but…’
Cayce gave her his full attention once again.
‘It’s not easy to say this…’ she stuttered. It never was, because it took her out of her mindset — to think of herself objectively, which she did not like to do, because it hurt, and it stopped her from coping with everyday life. Her heart clattered along and she dared to ask the question.
‘Can you keep a secret?’
Cayce went away, but told Lan to wait. Several torturous days drifted by without a reply. Her show went on. The show must always go on. Her concentration lapsed, and more than once that week she nearly stumbled off the high-wire. Astli very nearly struck her after that, warning her that if there were any slip-ups, if the accompanying fall didn’t kill her then he would.
For the first time in her life, though, none of this seemed to matter. Year after year she had thought herself unable to be true to what she felt, but now a miracle was being offered to her.
Messengers finally brought her letters. Furtively she would rip them open under the envious gazes of the other entertainers.
‘Care to show that to us, honey?’
‘Got yourself a lover out of town? Tell him I’ll take your place, honey — you know I’m much prettier than you.’
‘He can even bring a friend, I don’t care.’
Lan ignored them and read and re-read Cayce’s missives. First he had scribbled a resigned declaration that what she asked for simply couldn’t be done. Her heart broke, but then a day later she received another note declaring that he had changed his mind, that he had considered some new techniques and that the possibility of failure wasn’t a reason for them not to try. A few days after this, Lan received another letter telling her to travel to a tavern to the other side of Villtreeb, in a district cluttered with run-down taverns and dreary granite hotels. Slipping away after one performance, she took one of the workhorses, and braved the snow and ice. Only when she came out here, into the open plazas and past the decrepit shop facades, did she realize just how lucky her own life was. Irens here were void of much business, street corners became centres for illicit transactions, priests gave sermons alongside barrel-fires, dealing out nuggets of wisdom to a handful of onlookers. Lan climbed the slippery streets and passed under a hefty Jorsalir cathedral.
When she arrived at the rendezvous she found the tavern virtually empty. It was the usual kind of dive found all across the islands in which traders came to talk business and shake hands over nefarious deals. One secluded corner of the bar, beneath row upon row of antique agricultural implements, would become a meeting point between herself and the cultists over the next few nights.
Old networks had been dug up, they told her, and information was relaying back and forth across the island of Jokull, across the Empire. Her main contact smoked a roll-up, and every time he took a drag it seemed as if he might never complete a sentence, a habit that made the conversation agonizingly slow. Still, she had waited long enough. Cayce’s order of cultists was interested in her. It was suggested that they could be of help.
The second meeting, in their hooded cloaks, and with sharp shadows fallen across their faces, the cultists from the Order of the Chirurgiens — and Cayce himself — interrogated her. They searched her memories, dredged her soul. She told them everything.
‘I’ve always been a woman,’ Lan told them matter-of-factly. She’d repeated this to herself so many times in her head it was now like reciting a mantra. ‘It’s not a question of choice, I always knew I was a girl. That is my true gender. I’d played with dolls, with other young girls instead of boys, wanted to dress as them, and none of this ever seemed wrong. I guess some of us are simply born in the wrong body.’
They never released their gaze from her own; never gave her any indication of their opinion.
‘Throughout my childhood,’ she continued, ‘my father would incessantly plead with me to act “normal”. He’d hit me, at times viciously, trying to make a man of me. I was lucky enough to be schooled well, though bullied massively. I was beaten up more times than I care to remember. My father and teachers didn’t stop any of this, they said it would do me good. When I showed no signs of changing, I was taken to medical cultists, given erratic and eccentric treatments to make me more masculine. I was kicked out of school and whilst at home would try on my mother’s pretty dresses. After I was caught doing this my parents locked me in a room for days, whilst Jorsalir priests attempted to exorcize the demons within me. Apparently in our blessed church you are either male or female, and your gender matches your anatomy which matches your soul, and there’s no changing it. The world is black and white through Jorsalir eyes.’
‘I wouldn’t put too much trust in the words of priests,’ one of the cultists muttered, possibly a woman — it was hard to tell with any of them, which was strangely comforting. ‘The Jorsalir church has never been a fan of… development. That they are so entwined with the structures of the Empire remains saddening. They loathe people like us.’
Yeah, well I’m sure you didn’t have one abuse you at length, she thought, repressing that bitterness. ‘Anyway. I’ve conditioned myself to not let any of it affect me. I assume that they just feared what they didn’t understand.’
‘One of the many reasons that we cultists must keep to ourselves,’ Cayce observed dryly.
‘So eventually I fled from home and spent a couple of years in various rough spots of the city, even a short while in the caves of Villjamur. I found happiness with a friend for a while, but I can’t remember much of those days.’
They said nothing, merely listened.
‘Do you need any money, for all of this?’ Lan offered. She had some money tucked away, not much — her late father had grown fat off the ore industry and had dealings in Villiren. Because of their rift she hadn’t spoken to him in five years, so it had come as a gut-wrenching surprise when she inherited what little was left of the family money. Cancer had eaten up her mother a year ago, and Lan being the only blood relation left, and because of a quirk of Villjamur law — she was legally a man — the property deeds became hers without much question.
‘It may surprise people like you, but we are not at all interested in money,’ Cayce replied. ‘You see, where we come from, it is not of much use.’
‘Ysla.’ They breathed the name of their home island as if it was some nostalgic memory. She thought about the strange things that might go on there. An island populated only by cultists. She dreamed of magic.
‘We will be in touch,’ Cayce said, ‘so, if you please, do not go anywhere for a while.’
As if.
The cultists filed out one by one and Lan returned across the cold streets in deep thought. It had seemed like this questioning was all a formality, that Cayce already understood her needs, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up.
*
Another long wait followed, whilst she moved through the same routine: performance after performance, in front of diminishing crowds. How long would she have left before Astli reduced his staff again?
Night after night, while the other performers retreated to the dormitory, she waited alone by the moulded entrance to the amphitheatre in case another letter arrived.
*
Another freezing evening and another show, but this time there was a knock at the dressing-room door and a bald man kitted out against the cold asked her to travel with him to an outpost on Jokull. ‘Bring whatever you need for a short trip, and most of all prepare for cold weather. Snow’s deepened along the east of the island. Roads are shitting precarious at best.’
This is it then.
Lan was out of there. Her pulse was uncontrollable and she wanted to cry with joy, but she held herself together. She threw a few items into a bag whilst the others stared on impassively. One of the girls blurted out, ‘Where the hell d’you think you’re going?’
Lan thought she heard someone mutter ‘Dyke.’
