The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (10 page)

Seel woke him late. Presumably, Seel had slept deep and long too. ‘Flick, get up, there’s a problem,’ he said.

‘What?’ For a moment Flick couldn’t remember what had happened during the night. He thought he’d had a bad dream of some kind.

‘Cal’s room. It looks like an abattoir and he’s not in it.’

Flick could feel the colour drain from his face, which Seel would think was only natural under the circumstances.

‘We’d better organise a search,’ Seel said. ‘It’s possible… it’s possible he might have cut his wrists or something, although that’s not what I’d have ever expected of him.’ Seel’s expression was remarkably calm, but he kept swallowing hard. His olive skin looked sallow and damp.

Flick got out of bed.

‘There’s blood in the corridor, on the stairs, everywhere,’ Seel said. ‘You run over to Colt’s and Orien’s.’ He shook his head. ‘Fuck, what the hell has he done?’

Flick couldn’t speak. When Seel left the room, he went to the bathroom and washed his feet, without looking at the colour of the water that spiralled down the plug hole. Then, he returned to the bedroom and stripped down the bed. He didn’t look at the sheets, at the marks that might stain them where his feet had lain. He dressed himself with care and brushed out his hair, then plaited it slowly. Seel’s head reappeared round the bedroom door. ‘Get a move on! Flick! Snap out of it! We have to deal with this.’

Flick nodded and followed Seel to the stairs. He faltered at the top, seeing the glutinous trail of red that led to the bottom.

‘Don’t look at it,’ Seel said. ‘Just go and fetch Colt, Stringer and Orien. I’ll see to this later. Just go! I’ll start searching.’

Like an automaton, Flick walked to Colt and Stringer’s house. They were already up, and Stringer was working on some arcane-looking piece of machinery in the yard. ‘Can you come…?’ Flick said.

Stringer looked up. His face was smeared with grease. ‘Sure. What’s up?’

Flick saw the sun go red. Everything was red.

‘Flick?’

He felt hands upon him and he was sprawled on the ground, looking up at the sky. The sun burned into his eyes. He felt so cold.

‘What the hell’s happened?’ Stringer demanded.

Flick clawed himself into a sitting position, hanging onto Stringer’s shirt. ‘Something terrible,’ Flick said. ‘Sorry. Sorry… Just come, that’s all.’

‘Come where?’

‘Seel’s…’

Colt had come out of the house.

‘We have to go to Seel’s,’ Stringer said. ‘Something’s happened. Something bad.’

‘So much blood,’ Flick said. ‘Seel needs you.’

Colt and Stringer stared at him for a moment, then Colt growled, ‘that shit!’ and ran off.

Stringer lingered. ‘Go,’ Flick said. ‘I have to… I have to tell…’ He waved a hand in Stringer’s direction.

Alone, Flick sat in the yard, picking at weeds between his raised knees. He couldn’t face going to Orien’s, he just couldn’t, and yet he’d seen nothing with his own eyes. Cal could have slaughtered a horse and put it in the Nayati. ‘Slaughtered a horse in his bedroom,’ Flick said aloud to himself. ‘Yeah, that’s
so
possible. Idiot!’

He got to his feet. If he could only throw up, he might feel better, but the insides of his body felt like dust. Slowly, he walked towards the Nayati. Surely, somehar must have looked in there by now? And so they had. It must have been simple for Seel to follow the trail of blood.

Flick saw a crowd had gathered at the Nayati door. Colt stood at the threshold with his arms outspread, preventing hara from going inside. Numbly, Flick pushed his way through the crowd, and they parted to let him pass, because they thought he was close to Seel. At the door, a grey-faced Colt said, ‘You don’t want to go in there, Flick. Take my advice. Don’t.’

‘What have you found?’ Flick asked.

‘It’s not Cal,’ Colt said.

‘Then who?’

Colt glanced above Flick’s head at the crowd. It was clear that not everyhar yet knew what grisly secret lay within. ‘Just not Cal,’ he said, ‘but somehar who ran into Cal.’

‘Let me through,’ Flick said.

‘If the sight of what you saw at home made you pass out, you won’t take this,’ Colt said, but he lowered an arm.

Flick walked past him. The darkness of the interior was intense after the sunlight outside. He saw Seel, Stringer and a couple of other high-ranking hara doing something at the far end, near the altar. They were limned in light coming through a high window, framed in the act of cutting something down. There was a smell: terrible, meaty, sweet and foul. Flick turned his head away. He had seen a white, blood-streaked, dangling arm. He closed his eyes for a few moments, taking deep breaths, then went back outside.

‘Can I do anything?’ he said to Colt. ‘Does Seel need me to do anything?’

‘Are you up to cleaning the mess at home?’

Flick nodded slowly, his lips drawn into a thin line. ‘I could do that.’

The house was quiet, but for the lazy buzzing of flies in the kitchen, circling endlessly in the centre of the room. There air was sickly sweet. Flick went into the pantry and pulled out a mop and bucket. He filled the bucket at the sink. The water was bright and sparkling like diamonds, the sound it made so loud. Slopping water onto the floor, he lifted the bucket from the sink. He’d overfilled it: water went everywhere, over his clothes, his feet.

He began by the door, and by the time he’d reached the table, he had to change the water. He felt light-headed, disorientated, as if he was watching a movie of himself. This blood would never be cleaned away. Too much of it. He was just spreading it around, a thin film of Orien throughout the house. He kept seeing Orien’s face before his inner eye. Orien, smiling, laughing, his tawny hair hanging in tendrils around his face. Orien, who had brought him to Saltrock for inception. Orien being kind when Flick was sad. Orien’s words of wisdom. Silenced forever. It seemed to Flick as if the whole floor was red. He threw down the mop and surrendered to a fit of weeping, sinking down until he was crouched against the wall, surrounded by bloody handprints that looked like ancient cave paintings.

Seel found him there a couple of hours later. Seel had tied up his hair, but his shirt and hands were red. Without saying anything, he hunkered down and took Flick in his arms, kissed his hair. Flick fell against him, choking.

After a while, Seel hauled Flick to his feet and gestured at the mop. ‘Don’t bother with this,’ he said. ‘I’ll get somehar to come and do it. Go to the other room. I’ll get us a drink.’

Flick fumbled his way, half blind, into Seel’s parlour and lay down on the couch. There was no blood in here.

Seel came in and gave Flick a glass of brandy. ‘What’s left of it,’ he said dryly.

The taste, even the smell, made Flick feel nauseous. He remembered those hands on his body, the laughter, the smell of Cal. But he took the glass and drained it quickly.

Seel sat by Flick’s head and stroked his hair. ‘We have to suppose,’ he said carefully, ‘that Orien came back here last night. It’s clear that… it happened upstairs. The body was dragged from here to the Nayati.’ He paused. ‘I know this is tough, Flick, but I have to ask. Did you see anything at Orien’s house when you went there? Any evidence or clues?’

Flick shook his head. ‘I… I didn’t go.’

‘Why?’

Flick shrugged. ‘I felt sick. I was looking for you. Saw the crowd at the Nayati.’

Seel shifted a little beside him. Flick knew what he was thinking. Why wouldn’t Flick go directly to Orien’s house, which was nearer than Colt and Stringer’s? Why wouldn’t he run to fetch the one har on who they depended? Flick realised he should have lied.

Flick could hardly breathe in the silence. He could feel Seel becoming tenser beside him. Eventually, Seel said, ‘Flick, you didn’t
know
, did you?’

‘No, no, of course not! I just didn’t know what I was doing. I thought Cal was dead.’

‘Well, don’t be relieved because he’s not.’

‘Seel!’

Seel touched his shoulder. ‘Sorry, that was foul. This is… This is just the worst thing.’

The worst thing,
Flick thought,
is that I didn’t come directly to wake and tell you last night. Now I have to hide in a nest of lies. Cal has made me like him.

Flick felt responsible for Orien’s death, as if his silence had prevented help getting to Orien in time. But in his heart he knew Orien had already been dead by the time Cal had dragged him to the Nayati. ‘How did… what had Cal done to him?’ Flick asked. He didn’t want to hear the answer, but to punish himself he had to know.

‘We found him hanging,’ Seel said and paused before saying, ‘by his guts. Hanging by his guts. He was butchered.’

The pain of those words was like a penitent’s whip across Flick’s mind. ‘Why did he come back here?
Why?
’

‘God knows,’ Seel said. ‘To talk to Cal, I suppose. To try and help him. We’ll never know.’

‘We should have heard,’ Flick said. ‘Seel, why didn’t we hear and wake up?’

Seel had the fingers of one hand pressed against his eyes. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the bastard made it happen like that.’

‘I didn’t realise how much he hated Orien, how much he blamed him.’

‘I think we had a glimpse last night,’ Seel said, ‘but I’d have never believed he’d go so far. It’s his Uigenna blood.’

‘But you have it too.’

‘Uigenna indoctrination, then. I wasn’t that affected.’

‘How do we go on from here, Seel? What will we do?’

‘I don’t know. In the old world, we took so much for granted, criminals being hunted down and brought to justice. What do we do now? Hunt him down ourselves? He’s long gone, and an experienced traveller. We’d never find him. So, we tell the Gelaming? That’s the nearest we have to a peace-keeping force, isn’t it? Do you think they’ll find him for us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They won’t,’ Seel said, standing up. ‘They’re dealing with whole rogue tribes, inter-tribal wars and such like. One bad har won’t mean much to them.’

‘So, he just gets away with it?’

Seel sighed, shook his head slowly. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he said. ‘We’re powerless. He came here to do this. It was his purpose. He played with us all, like a cat with its prey, then he made his kill. I’m just gratified he’ll never be happy, never get true satisfaction from this. I tell myself to think of his hell, which he lives in continually. It’s the only comfort.’

Before they went to bed that night, Flick told Seel he wanted to change the bedding. He said he wanted to put the previous night well behind them. Seel accepted this and let Flick get on with it. Flick wanted to burn the sheets he’d removed earlier, even though the marks on them were scant. Perhaps it hadn’t really been necessary to change them, but that was Orien’s blood that would be pressed against his skin as he slept. Even if there were only a faint stain, it would burn him like acid.

The blood could be cleared away, the body burned, but the wounds Orien’s murder left on the Saltrock community would take a long time to heal. Hara found it inconceivable that anyhar could infiltrate their safe haven and commit such an atrocity. Seel organised a lengthy ceremonial funeral for Orien, and his body was burned on a great pyre in the middle of the town. Hara stood around numbly, confused. This was never meant to happen. How would they carry on without Orien, their shaman, their rock? Who was there to replace him? Nohar.

The day after the murder, Seel went to Orien’s forlorn empty home and collected all his cats, but they kept running away from Seel’s house, back to their old home. After a couple of days, two hara moved in to Orien’s place, just to look after the animals.

Flick rode out to the soda lake, taking with him the cook’s knife from the kitchen. He threw it into the corrosive bath of minerals and steam, and said a prayer. He did this alone, although in the shimmer above the waters, he thought he saw shadowy cloaked figures walking towards him, carrying staffs and dressed in long black cloaks. But they never reached him.

Over the following weeks, Seel and Flick moved awkwardly around each other, as if they’d lost their senses. Cal had duped them both, but this shared mistake didn’t bring them closer together. Flick didn’t have the energy to look after the house, and Seel spent nearly every day in his office, where the plans for a greater Saltrock lay spread out on his desk. He sat with his back to the window and his head in his hands, staring at the marks on the papers as if he’d never seen them before.

One morning, Flick went into the room without knocking. Seel looked up blearily.

‘I have to go,’ Flick said.

Seel just stared at him.

‘I’m sorry. It’s the only way. I can’t stay here. There’s a promise I made. I mean to keep it.’

‘Flick, don’t leave me,’ Seel said.

‘I have to,’ Flick said.

‘Where will you go? This is your home. You’re an important part of Saltrock.’

‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I can’t live with myself here. Don’t you understand?’

‘No,’ Seel said. ‘I don’t. It wasn’t your fault, what happened.’