I had hopes, at the end of this day of dead ends, that at least Abdo’s struggle might have come to its conclusion. Alas, the moment I stepped into Naia’s building, I could tell something had gone terribly wrong. A few of Abdo’s cousins still sat on the stairs, no longer laughing. Only the older women remained in Naia’s apartment, lighting candles in a circle on the floor. I paused in the doorway, wondering whether I had come back too early, but Naia jumped up as soon as she spotted me. Without a word, she took my elbow, led me to Abdo’s alcove, and drew back the curtain. Abdo lay on his mat, twitching fitfully, his eyes open but unseeing. An old woman dabbed his forehead with a wet sea sponge.
“We took him to Paulos Pende,” Naia whispered. “Have no doubt. You were right. The old priest put aside his ire—how could he not, seeing Abdo like this?”
“Abdo was like this?” I asked, horrified.
“Worse. He fought us; he bit Uncle Fasias. He would have been screaming, if he could scream.” She paused, and I saw that she was holding back tears. Her nostrils flattened as she inhaled; her lips trembled. “Pende could do nothing for him, not when Jannoula has got him and he’s fighting her so hard. We need to wait until he prevails and she is dormant, or until he loses the fight and she is at rest.”
I knelt by Abdo’s aged auntie, held out my hand, and said, “May I take a turn?” She wordlessly handed me the sponge, but she didn’t leave. We sat together and shared our sorrow.
There followed a fortnight of frustration.
I took Ingar’s things to Camba’s the very next day, but the doorman said Camba was attending a performance of Necans’s Bitter Nothing with her Tragedy Fanciers’ Club. I said I’d come back another day.
Abdo’s extended family cared for him in shifts. Naia was one of eight siblings, so every day it seemed I was meeting new aunts, uncles, and cousins. They came bearing hot food and took turns feeding him. The cousins brought amusements—dice, jacks, a snaking board game called sysix—but Abdo was in no condition to play. He tossed and turned as if with fever, or slept fitfully; sometimes he woke with Jannoula in his eyes, but she never had enough control to speak to me through him.
Morning and evening, I tried to talk to him. He replied only once: I’m building a wall, Phina madamina. Like you did. I think I can keep her from—
Then his struggle pulled him under again.
I went out every day with a tight, cold knot of worry under my ribs. Sometimes a dizziness would overtake me, an effervescent buzz of fear, but I steeled myself against it, putting one foot in front of the other and faithfully barking up all the wrong trees.
I went back to Camba’s. She was washing her hair and couldn’t see me.
I got better at identifying saarantrai in Metasaari; they were emotional for dragons, but their mannerisms were understated. They hadn’t picked up the boisterous range of Porphyrian gestures one saw in the rest of the city; they kissed each other’s cheeks in greeting, but with the utmost seriousness. I asked at saarantrai shops, doctors’ offices, importing houses, and law firms, but everyone told the same story: Eskar had been and gone. No one had so much as glimpsed Orma; his notes at the Bibliagathon remained undisturbed.
After four or five days of writing Camba and receiving no reply, I resigned myself to finding the other ityasaari on my own. I still had a garden in my mind, for all that it was rapidly shrinking (forty-seven paces between the Milestones; forty-two; thirty-nine). I could induce visions of any of them.
Winged Miserere, whom I’d already glimpsed, didn’t require even that much effort. I saw her almost every day, perched on rooftops or statuary, policing the city like some sinister vulture, her very presence a deterrent to crime. I couldn’t get near her perch, alas, and she did not deign to approach me. It occurred to me that my best chance to meet her might be to commit a crime. Of course, I never seriously entertained the notion; Kiggs and Glisselda would have been mortified.
I located the tall, athletic twins of my visions—called Nag and Nagini in my garden—on the day they were to receive public honors for their victories during the city’s Solstice Games. I rushed to the Zokalaa in time to catch most of the ceremony, watching from the back of the crowd, standing on tiptoe and craning my neck. They were fraternal twins, male and female, but they looked nearly identical with their close-cropped hair, white tunics, and skin the darkest shade on the Porphyrian spectrum. I guessed they were about my age, sixteen or seventeen. They stood atop the steps of the Vasilikon, holding hands, their eyes lowered modestly, while a great-voiced herald read out the Assembly’s proclamation of honor and a priestess of Lakhis crowned them with lush green wreaths.
Beside me, a bearded man—but then, that described half the men of Porphyry—smiled at my interest and leaned in. “They’re the best runners we’ve seen in a generation,” he said in Samsamese, mistaking my ethnicity.
He nattered on about their speed and statistics, and the glory of the goddess. I listened, curious whether he’d tell me they were ityasaari, but he never mentioned it. Was it simply unremarkable, or did he not know?
The twins lived with the other consecrated athletes in a special precinct behind the temple of Lakhis. There was no entry for the likes of me.
In visions, I often saw the one called Gargoyella hurrying up the steps of the Vasilikon. She was an elderly woman with white braids wrapped around her golden Agogoi circlet; she always wore a red stole trimmed in blue, clearly some badge of office. I questioned citizens in the Zokalaa and learned that she was a lawyer, the Assembly’s chief prosecutor, and her real name was Maaga Reges Phloxia.
I screwed up all my courage and stepped in front of her one evening as she was descending the steps. She was much shorter than me, and clearly did not like being stopped, because she smiled at me.
I’d seen that smile in visions, so I wasn’t surprised, but it was still alarming. Her mouth, which she normally kept tightly pursed, spread unnaturally wide, almost to her ears, revealing pointed teeth like a shark’s.
“Out of my way,” she said in clear Goreddi.
“Forgive me, Phloxia,” I said. “My name is Seraphina Dom—”
“I know who you are,” Phloxia said sharply. “Paulos Pende has forbidden me to speak to you. Do you know the full legal implications of such a priestly injunction?”
She was so lawyerly, so reminiscent of my father, that I almost laughed. I could tell I was about to get an earful, so I raised my hands in surrender to her shark-like smile and backed away. “I don’t know Porphyrian law at all,” I said. “I’m going to have to take your word for it, whatever your argument may be.”
Her gaze softened a little. “I think he’s depriving us of a wonderful opportunity. I always suspected we had Southlander cousins. I’ve been looking for a loophole,” she said quietly, her mouth wobbling grotesquely as she spoke. “I haven’t found one yet.”
Then she wrapped her stole around her and hurried away into the Zokalaa crowds.
The last ityasaari, Newt, was a singer. I enjoyed inducing visions of him; I could have listened forever. I knew he often performed in the harbor market, warbling behind a row of canvas booths, or joining in with singing fisherfolk as they unloaded their crab pots. I began stalking him with my flute, parking myself in the market to play. He didn’t approach, but I’d hear him in the distance, singing the shadow of my song. We circled, shy of each other, never meeting, until one morning I spotted him, sitting on the edge of the fountain: a white-haired, freckled old man with an oddly elongated torso and stunted limbs.
He had cataracts in both eyes, but he looked up as if he sensed me and smiled beatifically, his wispy hair fluffing in the breeze like clouds upon the mountaintop. He closed his scaled eyes, raised his chin, and began to sing a low, droning note. The crowd around him quieted to a dull murmur, elbowing each other, as if they knew his singing and treasured it. Above his drone, as light and tremulous as flames dancing on water, keened an ephemeral overtone, a ghostly, whistling harmonic.
This singing technique was called sinus-song in Ziziba. I’d read about it, and speculated upon its mechanics with Orma, but I’d never heard it done. I didn’t know the art was practiced in Porphyry.
After a couple of false starts, I found a way to accompany his ethereal song with my clumsy, earthbound flute. Together we wove a song of sky and sea and the mortals who must live between the two.
A trumpet blared, a brassy knife through the middle of our music, and we cut off abruptly. The crowd parted for a large palanquin draped in white, borne by muscular young men. Behind the gauzy curtains, I could make out three priests of Chakhon, Paulos Pende among them. Worried about the “priestly injunction” Phloxia had mentioned, I turned away reflexively so he wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want to get Newt in trouble for associating with me.
The litter passed and the marketplace resumed its bustle, but my music partner had disappeared into the maze of tables and tents.