Moths to a Flame Read online

  Gradually, the realisation came to him that, mingled with the birds’ keening cries were distant, desperate screams and cries for help.

  He went splashing back through the reed clumps towards the sand dunes, splattering his robes with mire-water.

  A carriage, escorted by crimson-clad horsemen, was fast vanishing over the dunes.

  He ran on, his bare feet thudding on the damp sand. But there was no way he could catch them up; even as he ran, they dwindled into the sea mist glistening on the horizon and disappeared from sight.

  A huddle of appellants met him at the open gateway, all talking at once in hushed, frightened voices. Cariel was crying.

  ‘What—’ he leaned against the gatepost, panting, ‘—has happened?’

  ‘They took her! They took Laili!’

  ‘Who? Who were they?’

  ‘They forced their way in. Their leader was tattooed,’ Cariel said. Lai saw the raw bruises marring her face, her swollen mouth.

  ‘Rho Jhan,’ Lai said, stunned.

  ‘We tried to stop them. They wouldn’t listen to us, the leader just arrested her, bundled her and the babe into a carriage and drove away—’

  Pherindyn came out into the courtyard.

  ‘Give me the key to the armoire, mhaestyr,’ said Lai.

  The heavy armoire door swung open and he lifted down his razhir.

  ‘Is there no other way?’ Pherindyn pleaded.

  ‘No other way.’

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘So … this is Melmeth’s whore.’

  Laili lay sprawled, shivering on the floor where Rho Jhan had flung her. She raised her head, trying to squint through bruised lids and a veil of matted hair to identify the owner of the low, honeyed voice.

  Soft footfall of delicate silk-slippered feet, coming nearer, pausing.

  ‘I warned you, Rho, not to play with her too roughly. I want to question her myself. Before I hand her over to Ophar.’

  Pain of aching limbs, pain of beaten body, pain like fire in her lungs at every breath.

  ‘I often wondered what he saw in her … ‘

  A thin groan of denial escaped Laili’s cracked lips.

  ‘Do you know where you are, whore?’

  ‘Baby. What – have you done with – my baby?’ Her voice, worn to a whisper, could hardly frame the words.

  ‘Give her some berindë, Rho.’

  Rough hands yanked her upwards. That male musk-sweat odour she had come to hate in the last days; seasoned leather and black liquorice. Rho Jhan.

  An open flask was thrust between her lips, grating against her teeth. Berindë scorched her mouth, her throat, making her choke.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Laili blinked. The room was in twilight but even in the dimness she could make out a slender woman sitting observing her, a blur of white and gold, cream and honey mixed, her luminous skin paler than the creamy silk of her robes.

  ‘You are – the Arkhys.’ Laili tried to focus on Clodolë’s face in the duskhaze. Her eyes. So large … So weirdly dark …

  ‘You see, Laili,’ the Arkhys rose from her couch and came slowly towards her, ‘you will be of use to me in a way that you could never have anticipated.’ As she came closer, her perfume seemed to enfold Laili in a summercloud of sweetspice; her very breath seemed laden with this strange, delicious perfume. ‘I know he cares for you still.’ Laili’s eyes flicked open suddenly. ‘Oh, not as you fondly imagine …’ A cool, soft hand drifted across her cheek. ‘If he loved you and you alone, little whore, would he have left you in the house by the sea?’

  ‘And if he loved you so much – why did he banish you from Perysse?’

  The soft hand drew back sharply; Laili flinched, expecting a blow. The blow did not fall.

  ‘Ah, there is so much you do not understand … You are too naive to know these things, to know how to keep a man in thrall even when he is far away …’ A hushed whisper of silk as the Arkhys moved away. ‘Is everything prepared for her, Rho?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘What are you going to do with my baby?’ Laili asked hoarsely.

  ‘Your baby?’ Clodolë began to laugh. ‘My baby. My beautiful son.’

  ‘Yours?’ Laili said in a gasp.

  ‘My long-awaited heir.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Laili reared up. ‘Where is my son?’

  Clodolë rose and drew aside a gold-threaded tapestry; beyond lay a gilded cradle hung with silken drapes of the palest Memizhon blue.

  ‘Look.’

  Laili strained to see, catching the merest glimpse of a soft tuft of copper hair before Rho Jhan pulled her back.

  ‘Sleeping soundly. But soon he will wake – hungry …’

  ‘And how will you be able to feed him?’ Laili said, scorn tainting her voice. She could already feel the milk burning in her swollen breasts.

  ‘An arkhys never feeds her own children! She employs a wet-nurse. And you will have to do for now … until Ophar calls you to answer the charges against you. By then I shall have found someone more suitable.’

  Lai made the last stage of the long journey back to Perysse on a farmer’s cart laden with baskets of glossy egg-plant and okra.

  They were still letting food into the city. And none of the tarkhastars on the city gate recognised him, as he sat beside the farmer, his face smeared with earth, his hair tucked into the wide-brimmed straw hat he had worn to tend Pherindyn’s garden, his razhir concealed beneath a pile of old sacks.

  But what a change had befallen the city! The once-busy streets were silent and deserted. The silk bazaar was closed; the clacking looms had stilled. Only the stench of the dye works hung like a cloud over the rooftops … mingling with the thickening pall of smoke from funeral pyres.

  Dusk found him sitting on the edge of the quay, the turgid waters lapping against the stone wall beneath his dangling feet. Soon night would smother the city, extinguishing all lights as curfew was called. Perysse: city of ghosts and shadows.

  Where had they taken her? Was she in the donjon? How could he get news of her?

  If only he could find Ymarys.

  Think. Think back. Where had he found Ymarys the night they left Perysse? The Mhaell pleasure house. The House of Ysmodai. Close to the quay.

  It was dark now; he stood up and made his way from doorway to doorway along the cobbled quay, searching for the gilded daemon’s head: Ysmodai the trickster.

  ‘A moment of your time, zhan Razhirrakh.’

  Lai whirled around, hand on razhir-hilt, razhir half out of its scabbard – only to see Arlan Azhrel in the doorway.

  ‘Arlan! I could have skewered you.’ He thrust the razhir back into its sheath.

  ‘Foolish of me. I was tired, I didn’t think.’

  Tm looking for the Pleasure House of Ysmodai.’

  ‘I’ve just come from there.’

  There was something tense, something twisted in Azhrel’s face.

  ‘Oh – and it’s not what you’re thinking. I’ve been with a patient of mine.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine you were visiting the House of Ysmodai on pleasure.’ Lai forced a wry smile.

  The twisted expression relaxed; suddenly Azhrel’s hands were on his shoulders, pulling him into a quick, fierce embrace.

  ‘In all truth I never thought to see you again. What in Mithiel’s name persuaded you to come back?’

  ‘I’ve got to find Ymarys. I thought he might be here – but the place seems deserted.’

  ‘The Haute Zhudiciar had all the brothels closed down when the plague got out of control. But you have come to the right place. He is here.’

  ‘In hiding?’

  ‘He has fallen sick.’

  This was a setback Lai had not anticipated.

  ‘The plague?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘Intermittently so.’ Azhrel put one hand on Lai’s shoulder, gazing searchingly into his face by the fading light of the wandering moon. ‘I have t
o warn you. He’s not … as you remember him …’

  ‘Arlan?’ Lai tried to scry the physician’s scarred face but shreds of ragged cloud hid the moon and a shadow veil fell between them.

  ‘See for yourself, if you must.’

  Ymarys lay in an upper room, naked beneath a threadbare linen sheet. He seemed not to hear the door open or the footsteps as they softly crossed the bare boards to his bedside. Beneath the medicinal smirch of burnt fever herbs, lay another, more insidious scent, a sweeter taint that Lai could not yet identify …

  Azhrel gently drew back the crumpled sheet; Ymarys did not ever stir.

  Lai gazed at the emaciated body, once so extravagantly praised by court poets, at the tumbled, lank hair, the dried and peeling lips, the several days’ growth of beard stubbling the sunken cheeks.

  ‘Ymarys,’ he murmured, shocked at the devastating change the sickness had wrought.

  ‘I have watched by his bedside for three days and nights now. He has not once regained consciousness.’

  Pallid grey light had slowly begun to leak into the room. Lai leaned forwards, peering in the half-light at Ymarys’s body, noting the irregular rise and fall of the taut ribcage. Ymarys, sensing the shadow, mumbled something in his sleep and shifted.

  ‘What is – that?’ Lai whispered, pointing. ‘There. And there again, another one – above the groin.’

  Ymarys made a sudden convulsive movement, clutching at his thigh, slapping at it as though to dislodge some clinging insect.

  ‘You saw?’ Azhrel said, grimly triumphant.

  ‘Surely it was just the twitch of a muscle?’

  ‘Keep watching.’

  ‘There – again. Like a rippling, a wriggling beneath the skin. Arlan—’ Lai looked up at Azhrel over Ymarys’s body.

  ‘Can’t you smell it in here? It clings, long after the moths have died, almost as if every pore were still exuding the stuff.’

  ‘Boskh?’

  ‘Oh, they’re subtle creatures, these moonmoths. They dull the senses of their victims with the dust on their wings. Then when the victim is too drugged with the dust to care, they inject their eggs deep below the skin. So when the grubs hatch, they have a plentiful supply of living food to sustain them.’

  ‘No!’ Lai cried. ‘It can’t be so!’

  ‘Is this the secret that your fellow adepts kept from you? That these transient, ethereal moonmoths are nothing but voracious parasites? Parasites that feed on human tissue?’

  ‘No,’ Lai repeated stubbornly.

  ‘I was slow to put the clues together. I couldn’t understand where they were breeding, how they were breeding—’

  ‘Isn’t there something you can do to save him? Anything?’

  ‘I call myself a physician, Lai, yet he’s beyond my skills and it pains me to sit here, just – watching him die.’

  Despair and fatigue had dulled Azhrel’s eyes; Lai saw in the greylight how worn, how exhausted he was.

  ‘When did you last get any sleep?’ he asked gently.

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘You need to rest,’ Lai said. ‘I’ll stay with him.’

  ‘I can snatch a nap in the chair here …’

  ‘If he takes a turn for the worse, I’ll send someone to fetch you. Go home. Go to bed.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a bath, that’s true. And a change of linen. But Lai—’

  ‘Go,’ Lai said, steering him towards the door.

  ‘I’ll come back by noon.’

  When the physician’s footsteps had died away, Lai unbelted his razhir and, laying it on the floor, settled himself in the chair at Ymarys’s bedside. From the open window the first sounds of morning began to disturb the silence: the clatter of cart wheels over cobbles, ordinary sounds on an ordinary day. And if Ymarys heard them, he gave no sign.

  ‘Jho … fiel …’

  Lai woke. The room was bright with daylight; for a moment he had no idea where he was. He tried to straighten up, wincing as his stiff-cricked neck protested – and realised that the voice he had heard was no dreamvoice but Ymarys’s.

  The still body on the bed had begun slowly to undulate, to writhe, as though griped by some silent internal agony.

  ‘Ymarys?’ Lai said, his voice thick with sleep. ‘Can you hear me?’

  The hands began to flex, to move over the writhing body, the head began to thrash from side to side.

  Lai reached out to grasp one of the wayward hands between his own.

  ‘Ymarys.’

  For a moment the lids flickered apart, revealing the dark-filmed eyes underneath then squeezed shut as the fingers clawed into Lai’s hands.

  ‘Close – shutters—’ A whispering hiss of pain, piercing in its sibilance.

  Lai stumbled across to the window and swiftly pulled the shutters across; as he looked at his hand he saw that the clutching fingernails had drawn blood. A pattern of light spots still speckled the floor by the bed, bright pollen on polished wood.

  ‘Water …’

  Lai poured water into a glass and knelt to try to raise the limp head and tip the glass to Ymarys’s parched lips. Ymarys took a few feeble sips, water dribbling down his stubbled chin – and then turned his face away.

  ‘Ahh – it burns—’

  Lai drew hastily back as Ymarys began to flail about, disjointed fragments of words gritted out from between clenched teeth.

  ‘Gnawing – inside—’

  He rose up, dark-veiled eyes staring unseeing into the sun-speckled gloom, grabbing blindly at Lai’s hand.

  ‘For Mithiel’s sake, let me put an end to this! Give me my blade, give me the death crystals, kill me before they – before they—’

  ‘Ymarys. Do you know me?’ Lai gripped hold of the wild-flailing arms.

  ‘Know you?’ Sweat-sticky fingers moved to touch his face. ‘Lai. Oh Lai. It is you.’

  ‘What has happened to Melmeth? Where is Laili?’

  ‘My protégé. You know where to cut for a clean, quick kill. Do it now.’ Ymarys dropped back onto the mattress, panting for breath.

  The door creaked open and Azhrel came padding softly across the polished boards to Ymarys’s bedside.

  Lai caught hold of his arm, pointing at Ymarys’s erratically jerking body.

  ‘Look.’

  Pustules were erupting along the ridges on Ymarys’s smooth skin. And as Lai watched, something began to emerge from the largest pustule, something yellowish-pale and glutinous, like an oozing jelly.

  Ymarys began to whine, a terrible thin, searing sound. The physician bent over him.

  ‘Easy now, Ymarys …’ With surgical tweezers he began to draw the emerging creature from Ymarys’s body until it hung, slowly squirming its translucent coils from the tips of the instrument.

  ‘What is it?’ Lai said, his gorge rising.

  ‘A moonmoth grub,’ Azhrel muttered. ‘Now do you believe me?’

  Ymarys’s hand reached blindly out, clawing for Lai’s.

  ‘Lai – do it – do it now—’

  ‘Can’t you do anything to help him, Arlan? Poppy to dull the pain?’

  ‘Nothing works. He can’t keep it down. He’s eaten away inside.’

  ‘Lai – I beg you—’ Scream of pain wrenched out, words barely intelligible.

  Lai looked at Azhrel; Azhrel looked hopelessly, defeatedly back.

  ‘How long will he last like this?’

  ‘Another day, two even …’

  Lai drew in a breath, then let it out in a slow, jagged sigh.

  ‘You go, Arlan. I’ll stay.’

  Azhrel nodded. He packed away his instruments and left without another word.

  Lai knelt by Ymarys’s side and stroked the sweat-soaked hair from his forehead.

  ‘Can you hear me, Ymarys? I’ll do as you ask. But you must grant me one last favour in return.’

  The phantasm of a wistful smile passed across the sunken features.

  ‘Am I still … that attractive, darling? You … flatter me …’ The wo
rds ended in a gasp, the emaciated body arched in a sudden spasm of pain.

  ‘Laili’s in danger, Ymarys. I have to find Melmeth.’

  ‘Melmeth – in mausoleum—’

  ‘The mausoleum? Is he dead?’ Lai clutched Ymarys’s hand tightly. ‘You must tell me, Ymarys.’

  ‘N–no. Arena tunnel – follow thylz—’

  The arched body collapsed, the words degenerated into an inarticulate whine, the whine of a dying animal. A trickle of black blood issued from one side of the cracked lips.

  Lai closed his eyes a moment, his lips moving in a silent prayer to the Goddess.

  The razhir slid from its sheath with the hiss of sharp-honed steel. It glinted, a pale sickle of moonshine, in the dim room.

  Ymarys’s teeth were bared in a grimace.

  ‘Do – it—’ he whispered.

  Lai grasped the hilt two-handed. Braced himself. Swung – arcing flash of moonshine – and struck.

  The room was silent now but for the buzz of a trapped insect beating against the shutters. But even as Lai wiped the blood from his blade, he saw a wriggle of movement beneath the skin of the still body, moth-maggots still at work in a corpse not yet cold.

  He wrapped his cloak about him and went slowly, numbly down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 22

  Darkwater. Chill darkwater many fathoms down below a frozen, sunless sea. Nothing stirs, not even a thread of current.

  ‘Laili – help me!’

  Only the black engulfing waters, cold as the realms of Ar-Zhoth, cold as death—

  Melmeth woke, clawing at the air, reaching out into emptiness. His skin was moist with cold salt-sweat, the crumpled sheets clammy as he clutched the fading darkness to him.

  ‘You were dreaming.’

  ‘Dreaming.’ He clutched at his heaving chest, trying to drag air into his lungs. Drowning. He had been drowning, not dreaming, even now the bitter brine taste of the black waters racked his throat.

  ‘And now you are awake.’

  ‘Clodolë. But you should be in Shandaïra.’ His thoughts were so muddled – he couldn’t remember why she had gone to Shandaïra, only that there had been some reason for it—