She surveys the crowd. Vohannes is very much alone. Yet he seems to see her and look away, so she can only see the back of his head. …
“What’s the matter with you, Vo?” she asks as she nears. “Are you sick? Are you insane? Or have you really been working at this all along?”
He turns to her and smiles. She sees he carries no cane. “The latter, I’m quite happy to say,” he says cheerily.
Shara freezes, and immediately sees why he kept his face turned from her until now.
It’s the same as the face she knows, almost: the same strong, square jaw, the same glittering smile. But this man’s eyes are darker, and they are sunken deep in the back of his head.
Shara doesn’t wait: she turns and runs.
Someone—a rather short, nonthreatening young man—ambles by, sticks his leg out, and trips her. She crashes to the ground.
The stranger stands and walks toward her with a pleasant air. “I did wonder if you’d come,” he says, “but I guessed the line about Tovos Va would seal it. After all, I taught that game to him. How pleasant to see that it worked!”
She starts to stand back up. The stranger gestures to her and mutters something. There is a sound like a whip crack. She looks down and realizes she is now totally transparent: she can see the stone cobbles through her legs, or rather where her legs should be.
Parnesi’s Cupboard, thinks Shara, right before someone behind her clamps a rag over her mouth: her nostrils fill with fumes, her eyes film over, and suddenly it’s very hard to stand.
She falls back into their arms: two men, maybe three. The stranger—Vohannes, yet not Vohannes—wipes his nose. “Very good,” he says. “Come along.”
They carry her down the river walk. The fumes force their way deeper into her brain. She thinks, Why isn’t someone helping me? But the bystanders merely watch them curiously, wondering why these men appear to be miming carrying something heavy between them.
She gives up; the fumes coil around her; she sleeps.
Across the snowy hills
Down a frozen river
Through the copse of trees
I will wait for you.
I will always wait for you there.
My fire will be burning
A light in the cold
A light for you and me
For I love you so.
Though sometimes I may seem absent
Know that my fire will be always be ready
For those with love in their hearts
And the willingness to share it.
—Book of the Red Lotus, Part II, 9.12–9.24
Family Ties
Shara wakes facing a blank gray wall. A trickle of air unwinds in her lungs before her body is overtaken with coughs.
“Oh ho!” says a merry voice. “Goodness! She’s awake.”
She rolls over, her brain fuzzy and hazy, and sees she’s in a barren, windowless room that is somehow familiar.
There are two doors to the room, one closed and the other open. The stranger stands at the open doorway, now dressed in a Kolkashtani wrap. He smiles at her, yet his eyes are like wet stones sitting in his skull.
“I really cannot tell,” he says, “what he could have seen in you.”
Shara blinks languidly. Chloroform, she remembers. It’ll be nearly an hour before I’m lucid. …