Aliyah

She made her way down the hall, balancing a tray in her hands. It held two meals; two gently steaming bowls of nettle soup and generous portions of fresh bread. Sturdy fare, plain but not overly cheap. There were honey twists on the side and, as was customary between them, a separate dish of green olives that only Rana was going to touch.

Apprehension twisted in her stomach, mixed with an uneasy swirl of fear. Was she really going to do this? It was one thing to trust the word of one’s mentor. It was another thing entirely to secretly drug one’s only friend based on the word of said mentor, and the words and the wounds of a spymaster languishing in the dungeon below…

She nudged at Rana’s door with a tendril of her magic; the twist of spellwork within recognised her, unlocked, and swung open. Though the room wasn’t far from her own, it was much larger, with an attached suite and windows that could be opened to let in the cooling evening air. They found themselves meeting there more often than not.

Aliyah was also pretty sure that it cost a significant chunk of Rana’s wages to lease. Still, what Rana chose to do with her own money wasn’t any of her business; it was a nice room and the fact that it made her feel embarrassed of her own sparse quarters was—or should be—irrelevant. She chided herself reflexively; even here, even now, seeing what she had seen and hearing what she had heard, petty worries seeped through.

Rana was, as per usual, at her desk and hunched over a heavy book. Sleepless circles lurked beneath her eyes. “Aliyah,” she said, smiling as she sat up and stretched. She was clad in an old-fashioned nightgown, one that she’d had for years; the puffy sleeves were rumpled and ink-flecked. “Come to point out my poor posture again?”

“I brought you some small things from dinner,” Aliyah replied as she shuffled cautiously over to the desk. There was a richly-woven rug in her path that she dearly wished to avoid spilling soup onto. “Let’s eat. You work too hard.”

She set the tray of food down onto the desk, pulled up a nearby chair. The windows were half-open; a clean, soft breeze caressed her cheek. There was not even a hint of harshness from the Killing Fields. A good weather day. Was it the work of the Magicians? She breathed in deep and steadied her nerves as best as she could.

“Ahh, thank you,” Rana said warmly. “ I don’t know what I’d do without you. But you know how it is, with work. A year or two and I might be promoted. I’ll be able to relax more then.”

Aliyah felt her stomach lurch at the unspoken suggestion behind those words. Promoted where, exactly? She wondered. Could it be to the Higher Library, stuffed full of awful memories and even further away from her? Surely not; Rana was skilled, but it could not be so soon. But then she caught herself: this was awful of her, to think this way. Rana should be able to go wherever best suited her, to any place that made her happy. Then she remembered with a jolt—if Lady Sadrava was telling the truth, it wouldn’t matter anymore. Nothing would matter anymore, other than surviving the Magicians.

“You have another late shift tonight, right?” she asked, even though she knew that she did.

“Unfortunately so.”

“Zahir gave me some of this fancy sweet tea and I saved some for you,” she said, taking the flask from her satchel. Her voice didn’t shake, but her hand might have; only ever so slightly. “It’ll probably wake you up.”

Rana brightened. “Aw, you’re too kind; thank you, I’ve been sanding my eyes on this book since I woke.”

She watched with a mixture of guilt and relief as Rana drained the flask. There. That was easier than she’d expected. Her only real friend was safe. Or at least, as safe as she could be.

“That reminds me,” Rana continued, placing the empty bottle down onto her desk, “I still need to feed Templeton and Inkblot. Want to give them a few treats afterwards?”

“Of course.”

Rana chattered throughout their meal, talking about how a bookshelf had collapsed the other day and of how she had convinced her coworker to buy a pair of pet rats for himself. They were both fawn-coloured and very cute, she said, and he was searching through texts from bygone eras to find suitably majestic names for them. The whole team was pitching in with ideas; Rana herself had suggested ‘Ninkilim’ and ‘Sir Fluffywhiskers”. She clasped her hands together as she said so, clearly delighted by her own joke.

Aliyah had smiled and nodded along, barely tasting her food. Behind the fluttery fondness—and that might be half a lie, but fondness was what she’d resigned herself to years ago—something ugly and envious twisted in the pit of her stomach. She knew it wasn’t fair of her to feel this way. Of course Rana should be happy at work. Of course she would have other friends. It shouldn’t matter if, over the years, she inevitably drifted away to be among her more educated peers. It would only make sense. But she was sitting here now, wasn’t she? That had to count for something. The very existence of the anti-haemolytic skirted on the edges of her consciousness; she batted it away.

“So,” Rana said as she speared an olive with a toothpick, “what have you been up to?”

Aliyah swallowed her mouthful of bread; it stuck in her throat. She gulped hastily at her soup to wash it down before replying. “Oh, not much. Work. Boring stuff, really.”

“Is everything alright? You seem sort of…down?”

“Um. I’m fine. Just tired. You know how it is.”

Rana squinted at her. “Hey, come on,” she said, her voice taking a turn for the serious. “You’ve barely said a word since you got here. What’s up?”

“I, uh,” she said as her brain scrambled for a plausible excuse. Her stomach churned with guilt; perhaps she should have eaten dinner at a later time, or even alone. But no—she needed this. She needed a nice, normal dinner with Rana after seeing the princess’s head roll and the state of Lady Kionah, still somewhere far down below.

“You can always tell me if something’s wrong,” Rana added, and oh hells, that made her feel even worse.

“I’ve just been having a rough time recently,” she said, which wasn’t untrue. “I had to go to the execution, remember? It was…a lot. It was…I suppose it was confronting to see it. And I’ve been having uh, pretty bad sleep. Nightmares. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

That last part wasn’t entirely true, but to Rana of all people, it would seem true enough. Rana had spent hours witnessing her retroactive fears in the months after the Library incident. She’d cleaned up after her. Once, she’d held her hair out of her face as she’d vomited all over her bedroom floor. More nightmares, more emotional turmoil—it wouldn’t sound like anything new. Rana was probably sick of it, as it was. She was always there with nice words, but Aliyah suspected, deep down, that she was thoroughly tired of it by now and that she had enough problems of her own to deal with.

“Oh,” Rana said, bringing a hand to her mouth. “That’s…yes, that’s simply awful. Is there anything I can do?”

Rana looked genuinely concerned, which didn’t help the half-panic, half-guilt twisting within her.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Not really,” she replied as the knot of guilt inside her chest tightened. “Maybe…I’d much rather distract myself. Can we feed your rats? They’re always, uh, cheerful.”

“Of course,” Rana said, and patted her on the shoulder. “Over here.”

She hopped out of her chair and walked past her fashionably circular bed—crowned with a fresh abundance of velvety pillows, no less, which made Aliyah wonder just how much overtime Rana had been pushing in—over to a large, intricate cage strung with platforms and ramps and hand-sewn hammocks in colourful fabrics. She pulled out a box of rat-pellets and a tin of tiny oat-cubes from a basket dedicated to them.

“Here, you can give them two treats each,” she said as she unlatched a portion of the cage and placed pellets into the food dishes within. “Normally it’d be more, but Basima came by yesterday with some spare sweet potatoes—her sister’s a Weathermancer, you know—and, well, we couldn’t resist feeding them some extra. They are such spoiled little darlings.”

The rats did look well-cared for, with their bright eyes and glossy coats. But they weren’t so different from the common castle rats that she had euthanised and cut open, not too long ago; limbs splayed open, skinned and pinned as she fixed little paper labels to each miniature organ. She found herself imagining each of the little creatures going into septic shock before she cut herself off, shivered inwardly, and dutifully fed them the oat cubes.

Rana chattered on about little, light-hearted things; this intriguing book they found on the migration patterns of skyfish, that adorably pastoral piece of embroidery someone at work had finally finished last night, her latest attempts at terrariums that all dissolved into primordial sludge given enough time.

And though her chatter was cheerful and blandly inoffensive, Aliyah’s mind seized upon the bright topics and twisted them into uglier things, morbid thoughts that had no place in the conversation. If Zahir and Lady Kionah were correct, she wouldn’t be here to see the next skyfish festival. She would never get to gift Rana the embroidery set she’d been saving up for on said festival.

At the mention of terrariums, she got stuck on some dubious, dusty textbook fact or other, dredged from the depths of her memory: that all the world was a closed system running down, and that physical-entropy-something-or-other would reduce even the stars down to sludge and nothingness given due time.

At that, she frowned at herself. There was such thing as catastrophising too far. It was almost funny, how the smaller matters were bothering her more than the idea of dying. She shook herself out of her dread-soaked musings to focus on what Rana was saying.

“Oh, and Samara brought in some more fig cookies today,” Rana said. “There are a few left in my satchel that we can share.”

“That’s very kind of you to offer, but I think I’ll pass if she’s put a wakefulness tisane into them again,” Aliyah said, an easy lie springing to mind. “I need to sleep soon—early shift, you know how it is.”

“Oh, well then in that case, you should really leave the dinner tray with me; I can drop it off before I start my shift.” Rana tutted in sympathy. “By the way, are you free tomorrow afternoon? We could go down to the market. Farid told me that his wife’s family has a new sweet-cake stall running.”

“That would be lovely,” Aliyah choked around the lump in her throat. “See you then. Take care.”

“You too!”

So at least she had something to look forwards to if it turned out that Zahir was wrong and the Magicians weren’t coming to kill them all.

She walked to her own room a little faster than usual. The tears were easier to hold back this time; only a few squeezed out. She wiped her face roughly with the back of her sleeve, erasing them entirely.

No point in changing into a nightgown. Instead, she hung her best cloak—sensibly coloured, dark grey, charmed to be mostly waterproof—on the hook at the back of her door and readied her sturdiest pair of shoes by her bed.

Glancing around her sparse room, she did not see anything to miss. All her life boxed into this chamber; a set of potted purple shade-plants, an almost-empty tub of hand cream, a cheap comb, a stack of borrowed books. There was a half-finished embroidery piece on her tiny desk, a desert rose motif in pink and gold. She had been so pleased to have saved up for it, then to have started it a week ago. Did it even matter now?

Focus, she told herself. Were there any meaningful, travel-sized mementos to take with her? Anything useful to aid her survival? Rana was not travel-sized, so no, not really. She would just have to hope that Glister libraries carried botanical guidebooks for perusal. The injustice of it all hit her then, and she sat down onto her bed with a thump. What did books matter? There would be no Rana in Glister City.

A year or two, she promised herself, fighting back more tears. If she left, she would return as soon as she could. If Zahir was right and Shadowsong was already crumbling, then the rule of the Magicians was hardly absolute. Even if they stayed in power, they would forget about her, and she would return. She would find passage on a cheap skyship, a way to disguise herself. This couldn’t last forever.

She checked her skin-pouches over, a little fretful that they might turn necrotic at any second despite her knowledge to the contrary. Dungeon keys and spell-slips in one pocket. Pouch of spell-slips and pouch of coins—golden crowns, and exactly thirty-seven of them, she thought uneasily—in the other. A small part of her was still hopeful, still holding out that she wouldn’t need them after all.

She pushed the memory of a bloodied Lady Kionah to the side.

She very pointedly did not think about Rana.

The keys burned cold against her thigh as she drew the covers over her head.

===

She fell asleep, and sank into a dream.

It was the sort of dream where one was vaguely aware of the falseness of the dream at the back of one’s mind, but far too entrenched in its contents to fully realise it. Fighting the dream-reality felt like sinking into a mocking sea of syrup, with viscous, slug-like sugar-daemons crawling into her ears and nose and lungs, so she stopped.

The princess Alhena sat upon a melting throne, feeding little green fish to her own severed head. The fish were still alive and they wriggled as they entered her mouth and fell out of her neck, flopping uselessly against the salted earth.

Dancing hand-in-hand around Alhena were a dozen ladies wearing Magician-blue dresses. One of them resembled the Lady Kionah, torture wounds and all. She bled a dripping trail of blood as she whirled past, marking damp patterns into the ashen soil.

Somewhere in the distance behind her, Zahir’s voice was reciting lessons.

The ladies slowed in their clockwork-carousel-dance and advanced upon the seated princess. They began carving her up with their bare hands, as if she were some elaborate dish at a banquet. There went an eye, a hand, an arm out of its socket.

Aliyah fought to turn away, but her eyes remained fixed upon the ghastly scene. She could feel salt crystals burrowing into her bone marrow. It didn’t hurt; the sensation was dulled and confusing, not quite right. Was she meant to be here, she wondered, grasping onto a thread of reason for half a heartbeat. Then it slipped away on the breeze, before she could haul herself back to lucidity.

Alhena wailed aloud, a moment before they took her tongue.

“Listen,” said Zahir’s disembodied voice, suddenly very close. “I can tell you this because you are not a real apprentice and as such, you don’t need to give a damn about protecting the royal family.”

The Kionah-lady was starting to bleed a mixture of blue blood and frothy vanillin tea.

“There are people, wounded or whole, beggar or prince alike, there are people who will tell you that you need to heal them,” Zahir continued. “They will tell you with their words and their eyes and their actions that you need to heal everyone, because you are a Healer and you have a gift, because you are kind and good and compassionate and self-sacrificing, as all Healers must be.” He paused and sighed deeply, just as he had when they had had this conversation the first time.

The ladies were feasting now, their dresses dyed indigo with splotches of blood. Their jaws unhinged like snakes, bones straining against the unnaturally elastic skin of their faces. They gorged themselves, attacking the melting throne and tearing off pieces of the molten metal. They stuffed it into their mouths as if it were strings of sugar-candy, oblivious to the way it burnt their lips and tongues.

“It will probably be worse for you because you seem to be an unthreatening young woman. So know this: they will drain you dry if you let them. Know that they see you as a tool because in a way, you are. But know that you are a person firstmost. Know that you may have to make difficult choices between caring for yourself and saving others. You cannot save everyone. You cannot even save most of everyone, if you want to have a life worth living. But above all, know that you cannot save everyone.”

The ladies, bloated and sated, wobbled to their feet and linked hands again. They formed a ring and began to dance once more, circling the stain that used to be Alhena.

“You cannot save everyone,” Zahir was saying on repeat. Her pulse was pounding in her ears. Something bloody and rotten was crawling up her esophagus, writhing against the back of her throat. “You cannot save everyone. You cannot save everyone. You cannot save everyone. You cannot save everyone. Silly little Aliyah, you cannot save anyone.”

Yes, she knew this feeling. She knew it too well. Her heart sped up reflexively. Her arms felt numb.

The ladies danced ever-onwards. Aliyah coughed, and vomited up a glossy tide of little green fish.

“Wake up,” someone said. “Wake up!”