Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

When she was gone I turned to Justice.

“You’re a Paphian,” I said, pushing him against the wall. “You’ve stolen me to be a prostitute.”

He winced, shook his head. “No, Wendy. But I am a Paphian.” He drew his hand to his mouth and rested three fingers upon his lower lip: the Paphians’ beck, signifying the three sexes. “But I have no claim on you. They would have killed you, Wendy. I would have killed you before I’d leave you to them …”

I scented his arousal again, tinged now with the metallic edge of fear as he edged away from me. I felt a sudden rush, as though I had received a jolt of acetelthylene. Where the small nodes bulged from my temples a faint warmth spread until my hair prickled and stood on end. And suddenly I felt it, felt Him, that overwhelming desire and terror surging through me like raw adrenaline. I laughed.

“I was the wrong toy for you to steal, Justice,” I whispered. I brought my face close to his, until his shallow breathing warmed me. I brushed my tongue against his cheeks, tasted his bitter pleasure. Then I bit his mouth, until I felt my teeth meet through his soft skin.

With a cry he kicked me away, but not before I kissed him to draw a sharp draught of blood. I reeled backward, dizzy at the intensity of his desire, and drew my hand to my face to wipe the blood from my chin. I started to lick my fingers; but he grabbed me.

“I did not steal you! I saved you—”

But his words echoed meaninglessly as I gave myself up to a sudden shuddering ecstasy. I struck at him only to trip and fall. Pain blurred into an image dredged from the last fevered drop of blood upon my tongue:

My own face, blank and calm upon its soiled pillow. A golden-haired figure stands silently above me, watching for hours as I dreamed …

“ Wendy— ”

I blinked to see him standing there still, the pale blue light tinting his cheekbones and his luminous eyes. But he no longer wore HEL ’s yellow robes, and his golden hair now hung loose and tangled from our flight. I shook my head, tried to stand. Justice glanced behind him before pulling me into a sitting position.

“You fainted.” He rubbed his mouth ruefully where a dark welt marred his lower lip. “You really are crazy, aren’t you?”

I stared at the phosphorescent ceiling. My head ached, and the giddy pangs of desire were gone. I felt only an indifferent regret for having hurt the boy who’d saved me.

“I’m not safe company for you, Justice,” I said at last. “I’ll harm you, whether I want to or not.”

He edged closer to me, eyeing the doorway where Lalage had disappeared. “I saw your scan on the monitor that afternoon.” He spoke softly, his blue eyes intent upon me. “You thought you were entering a fugue state.”

“I was wrong.”

“But something did happen; that’s why you came to me for the scan. You killed them, didn’t you?”

I felt a pressure building inside my chest. “I didn’t kill them,” I whispered. “I told you that—I told them all that.”

“But somehow you drove them to suicide: Morgan Yates, Emma Harrow, the sleep researcher. All those children. Why? How?”

I leaned forward and gripped my knees. Inside my head a vision was forming, distinct from the dimly lit room around us. I bit my lip, feeling sick at the taste of my own blood; thought of tapping Justice again, to somehow draw him into the scintillating landscape that was beginning to loom behind my eyes. Black mountains, an endless plain shot with dead white light. In the air in front of me something else began to form. A spectral figure crouched as if preparing to spring.

I snatched my hand from Justice and pounded my fist against the wall behind me, hard enough to make me gasp with pain. The brilliant interior horizon shivered. The ghostly silhouette disappeared. I sat in a narrow corridor flickering with blue light, staring wildly at a fair young man.

I gritted my teeth, waited for the throbbing in my knuckles to subside.

“Justice,” I began. “Dr. Harrow engaged in therapy with me. Did you know that?”

Pupils retracting in gold-flecked eyes: no.

“She—Something went wrong. A long time ago …

“She and her twin brother played at—at witchcraft. They invoked something, and—it came. Something strong and dangerous. It killed her brother; it drove him mad, and he hanged himself. But she had this—hypostate—dormant inside of her all that time. When she did my neural implants fourteen years ago, I think the engrams were stronger than anyone ever knew. She patterned me without really knowing it was there, that memory, without me knowing. And nothing happened until I was the same age she was when they woke it, and then it—it manifested itself.”

“And that’s what you think killed Dr. Harrow?” He tilted his head in disbelief. “What of the others?”

“It just waited until I tapped anyone susceptible to it. It latched on to them: Morgan, Melisande …”

“A poet and a sick child, a dreaming woman,” Justice said slowly. “And Dr. Harrow …” He laced his fingers with mine. “But what is it?”

“I don’t know. A hypostate. Some terribly destructive impulse …” He stared at me, thoughtful. “Twins, and—well, something. Like Baal and Anat.”

“What?” I shook my head impatiently.

“A story, a masque of ours, about twins. At Saint-Alaban. Baal wakes Death, but his sister Anat saves him. It’s a story of the Magdalene, really. A fable.”

I snorted, and he glared at me.

“Well, if you’re carrying this thing inside you, why hasn’t it affected you? Why aren’t you dead? Why didn’t it kill the other empaths when you tapped them?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps because of what we are: maybe we have nothing for it to feed on. But it drove her to despair. The last—what I felt of her—” I licked my lips at the memory.

Justice flinched and rubbed his mouth gingerly. “So it’s a parate emergent personality,” he said. “Like Andrew—”

“No!” I insisted. “Andrew is part of Anna. They induced him when she was little. She was afraid of the dark,” I called wistfully. “But this is not mine.”

“How do you know? All of the multiple personalities at HEL considered themselves independent.”

“I am not an MP!” I lashed at him. He grabbed my hand, but at that moment we heard the curtains being drawn behind us.

“Ah. Pardon me, cousins.” Lalage smiled. I drew away from Justice and stood up too quickly. I felt dizzy again. Justice grabbed my elbow and nodded to Lalage.

“He’s tired,” he explained, glancing at me with concern. “We’ve come a long way …”

Lalage held the curtains so that we could pass into another narrow hallway. “Curators tire easily. Don’t they?” she added sympathetically.

She had changed clothes. Now she wore a loose crimson tunic, no less soiled than the other; but it was harder to see the stains on this one’s darker fabric. And she had braided her hair into tight coils about her ears. I thought curious that she would bother to change clothes for two itinerants, until I also noted that she invariably directed her questions to me. Even when Justice answered, her eyes never left my face.

“What is the news of the City?” he asked as we followed her through a twisting hallway. Baskets and heavy sacks lined the walls, Lalages wealth. It smelled overpowering of cumin and coriander and cinnamon.

“It will be a harsh winter this year. The lazars grow bolder every day. The Ascendants I entertained last week boasted of war with the Balkhash Commonwealth.”

I would hear more of this, but Justice interrupted. “But what of our Houses, Lalage? What news there?”