Carryl looked into the attic. She never was really familiar with it, it was like a dark chamber of dry heat before emerging into the free air above the city, but now, it seemed like a spacious dungeon, and somewhere inside, a monster lurked for her.
“I am over here, let’s sit down.” Nannade’s voice came from a group of crates and barrels draped over with tarps, creating a small alcove for the two to sit down in.
Carryl followed Nannade’s voice. She took out her light vial and put it on the floor between them. The little light lit up Nannade’s face just barely. “What is this levelling of the scales you talked about?”
Nannade waited for a moment as if to spend a last thought on her decision, then went ahead. “I am going to tell you things that run against things that you might believe about this real world, but what I tell you is all true. Then you will know why I will never tell on your misdeed. Then you can leave and let it be or maybe we can continue to be friends. But please, recognize my honesty.”
It all sounded like pretty preambles to Carryl. “Just get on. What is the truth?”
“I am a sinner.”
Carryl halted her thoughts for a moment. “A sinner?”
“Yes.”
“So? We all sinned some time.”
“No, a branded sinner. I bear the mark. I am slave to honesty.”
Carryl looked at Nannade’s forehead and saw nothing. “No you are not, stop lying.”
Nannade got up and started to undo her wrappings, revealing underneath clear skin coruscating in the dim light of the vial. Her bare chest shone pink through the light white fuzz and that crest of long white hair in the centre of it all. She turned around and in an instant a single thought filled Carryl’s awareness.
Sinner. There it blazed in cruel and crude strokes on the back of Nannade’s left shoulder, revolting, disgusting, her stomach turned in rejection of that thing.
“But why? Why is it not...”
“On the forehead? That’s a lie they told you. The mark of the sinner has universal power, no need to apply it to the head. Go ahead, ask me.”
“Ask you? Ask you about your sin?”
“Yes, ask me what my sin is.”
Carryl set out to ask her but stopped herself. She knew in her heart that the mark she saw before her was real, she could feel the wrongness well up in her and yet she did not want to force this upon Nannade. “No. It is fine, you do not need to tell me.”
But Nannade insisted. “Ask me. This is my atonement. This is your leverage. Without this, we cannot be...” she held for a moment, then spoke very quietly. “...friends.”
Carryl set out. “Sinner, what is your sin?”
In an instant with compulsion and reflex beyond normal, Nannade answered. “In the summer of 1346, I engaged in a bodily pact with a daimon, granting it permanent residence within mortal reality.”
It sounded surreal. “You engaged in a daimonic deal?”
“Yes.”
“To merge your flesh with a daimon?”
“Yes.”
Carryl let it sink in for a moment. Apart from Nannade’s height, she seemed like a normal crolachan to her, not a monstrosity at all. Nannade knelt down, back still turned to Carryl. Only now did she see that there were other glowing symbols on her back, including two on her right shoulder that were definitely seals of magic academies. Then that disgusting scaly beast slithered up Nannade’s arm and onto her shoulder and Carryl understood.”
“So Ssil is not your familiar then?”
Nannade shook her head. “Not quite, but somehow still. The greatest lie is the one that’s true as long as you don’t tell all of it. She was my guardian angel. I asked her to save me from my mother’s fate and she called my saviour to bring me into servitude again”
“Your saviour? Servitude?”
“The man you know as Monsieur Garetas. He freed me. He trained me to be this valued professional.” By now, she said those words with a spite Carryl would not even refer to a sinner with. “And because he trained me, I owe him. The Lodge of Sturreland helped him, as you can see.” She pointed to the right side of her shoulder to the topmost symbol. It sat above a name cartouche in the script of names and next to it again was a second seal of an academy that Carryl did not recognize. “They trained me in mystic arts and gave me their seal of approval, binding me to their contracts. Then the Houses of Mysteries of Chsyatana did the same. As soon as I have three of them, I can take my own contracts. But I still owe Garrett. He paid for all of it, a debt I have to pay back through years of contracts. Spying, investigating, assassinating.”
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“Assassinating? So it is not merely investigations as Professor Fesure said.”
Nannade let out a chuckle. “You didn’t think they’d let an abomination like me live just to have me snooping around campus for petty thieves, do you? I am much more than that. I am a tool, a weapon, nothing less. Honed for years to show no mercy as I hunt down users of magic for crimes less than what I did. If anyone were deserving of death, it was me.”
“You do not look like an abomination.”
Nannade held up her hand and Ssil slithered on. “As I said, the lie is hidden in the truth.” The two looked at each other in an understanding. “We might look apart, but we are like two fingers of the same hand, reaching into the water.” The snake was now wrapping herself tightly around Nannade’s arm, pressing and squeezing her flesh between the coils of her body until scales and fur merged like two droplets of rain on a windowpane. Ripples travelled across the skin that behaved now little more than water and from beneath the surface, a new creature rose up, pushing the body into a new shape. The limbs lengthened even further, the spine grew and bent, the corners of the mouth grew backwards and the jaw hinged open like that of a reptilian monster. The short tail underneath the wrapping whipped and slithered and when the creature that had been Nannade before looked at Carryl, she could see not eyes of gold, but a caustic green, like pain, and a fire behind it that burned for her.
But the creature forced itself to avert its eyes from Carryl and the hunger in them was gone. What Carryl saw before her was much more like the distorted figure that she had seen in the alley. Carryl had reservations of addressing that creature before her. Disgust and pity welled up inside of her. “Is that the real you?”
“It is not real, no part of me truly is, but it is me.”
Carryl did not believe that thing before her for some reason. The snake slithered out of the creature’s skin and took with it the changes. The abomination receded from the surface and Nannade returned in what was left. There she sat, curled away from Carryl, looking her way from golden eyes reflecting dimly in the light of the tiny light vial between them. But what remained was the disgust Carryl felt.
“You hate me.” Nannade said. “But I should have expected that. It is natural, it is the purpose of the mark and it is as healthy as gagging on rotten food.”
“Then why would you show me? Why would you do that to supposedly save our friendship? Do you not remember the way Merry reacted to that sinn-“ She had to stop. “The sinner was not talking about me when he said majesty, did he?”
Nannade shook her head. “That you did not speak up was my luck that day, but technically, every sinner could expose me. I can hide my mark to hide my identity, because I am so valued. But we all know each other by heart. He have seen each other’s souls in our first dream with Him.”
“With Whom?”
“Telling you would tell you nothing, I am afraid. This is one thing you cannot learn from a distance. You’d have to meet Him.”
Carryl wanted to ask but realized she was running against a wall, then she remembered something about the many symbols on Nannade’s back. “That line above your mark, with the point at its apex, is that why the sinner called you majesty?”
“Yes.” Nannade wanted to turn around, but Carryl felt disgust well up inside of her again.
“DO NOT SHOW ME THAT!”
Nannade stopped without flinching. She had expected that. “It is a crown. Or at least one point of it.”
“What is a crown doing there? Why would they put that there?”
“They didn’t, I acquired it from its previous bearer. It is a fragment just like the mark of the sinner is. A fragment of something that was destroyed for no fault of its own, something that was once more powerful than all else. I found it in the possession of my master at the Houses of Mysteries of Chsyatana. I do not know what he had planned with it, but I took it from him, united it with my mark.”
“And now you are the queen of sinners? Do you command them?” Images of an army of rapists, murderers and fraudsters came up in Carryl’s head, folktales of evil queens that bring destruction to the land before being vanquished by a shining hero.
“Only as far as I am a branded sinner myself. No, it is the unmarked sinners that should be afraid of me.”
The look Nannade threw at Carryl told her that it was exactly her own recent sin she was referring to. “What, why?”
“Because we are all sinners, to a degree. As the stone crumbles to dust and the sea dries to salt, mortal beings sin. We all bear the mark of the sinner within us, mine is merely cut open for you to see. Calling it a brand is actually bad form, if you’d ask me. It is not like a farmer presses a hot iron onto his cattle, marking it with something that wasn’t there before, or a slave with sigils to bind the blood to a foreign will. It is making what is already there seen, a shaped incision and clamping the wound open, so it can never heal.” Her words became dark, a tone was in her voice that sank down to the bottom of a saddened heart. “And now everyone can just put their finger in my wound, make me squirm by pressing into it. That’s what it feels like, Carryl.”
Carryl saw Nannade sitting there, slumped and defeated, but she could barely muster the recognition of that. She still felt disgust and hate for that thing before her, wrong in so many ways, a thing she had called a friend just hours before.
Carryl stood up. “It is time for me to go to bed. I will not tell anyone, but mostly because I do not want to see Merry devastated.” She walked to the ladder to get out of the attic and threw one last glance to Nannade and saw her turn around just in time to notice the blazing red disappear behind her shoulder. She felt as if saying something one would say to a friend. “Be safe now.” Then she went down the ladder. She hoped things would seem clearer in the morning.