THREE – AUSINE

The morning was the night, the night was the morning, and which you perceived when depended on what sleeping pattern you had fallen into on a particular day. What I called my night was, to Nangi, her morning, and most days when I awoke, I would still have time to visit her at work, to catch a late performance at the Cavern establishment known as the Mourning Glory.

The Mourning Glory was a small club but a prolific one, entertaining clientele from every walk of leftover Valeyrian life. It was one of the first profitable businesses to be established when the Cavern Walk opened more than three years ago. The Cavern Walk was an upscale place all those years ago, a retail, housing, and dining center spewed from the brains of the city fathers, who knew that the streets of Valeyria were becoming too crowded. No use in fighting City Hall, they knew, over the mandate that prohibited the destruction of historical buildings, and no profit to be seen by constructing a business hub on the outskirts of town. And so Cavern Walk was born, a fusion of natural and unnatural chaos that breathed eerie life into the natural catacombs sprawling beneath the landscape of our fair city. Ventilation was adequate, safety was subpar but nothing to be concerned with anymore, and the look of the whole place simply crackled with strangeness. The natural limestone with its artistically eroded patterns made walls between the storefronts, where stalagtites made lighting fixtures and stalagmites made columns. It was like shopping in a tomb, to my more literal mind, but the less flamboyantly morbid of the population found the surroundings to be culturally enchanting, a one-of-a-kind shopping experience.

Now the Caverns were the safest place to be, beneath the filth above ground, away from the decay of the streets. Valeyria had marveled, three years ago, at the scope of the Cavern Walk project, the simply unreal prospect of two square miles of plazas and apartments, ice cream shops and designer boutiques. All that space, we shook our heads at the time, was ludicrously frivolous. But now, when our survival depended on it, too much was never enough.

Set on the cobbled street a few yards away from what used to be the Lionel Avenue entrance, the Mourning Glory boasted a flickering neon sign in flowing Celtic script, above a black marble edifice where beer ads and entertainment fliers made it a welcome place to find oneself on an otherwise tired night. It used to be a venue for the ridiculously important, a place that sold out concerts within moments of posting tickets, a place too popular to simply breeze into without being invited. Now, of course, everything at the Mourning Glory was everyone’s, regardless of class distinction. Nangi received a modest weekly sum for her efforts as a singer here, and I pumped in a meager sheaf of dollar bills whenever I could in exchange for alcohol to dull the tinny blast of the damaged sound system.

They knew my name at the Mourning Glory, and greeted me with a smile. Sad smiles, but eager smiles, nonetheless. No one was truly happy anymore, except in momentary bursts of euphoria where hope seemed alive and paradise seemed only a few steps away. I liked coming to the Mourning Glory because I witnessed those bursts more often. It was a gathering place for euphoria, backed by frenetic music and fevered chatter, the occasional peal of laughter from the occasional merry soul.

My usual table was tucked into a corner on a small landing next to the stage, a seat that rarely saw play from the performers, but provided a nice, unobtrusive place to observe and be ignored at the same time. The lights from the stage hit the table in transit, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the warmth they held for me. I had been fearing the coming winter again on my walk from the airport.

That morning I’d been able to split a crusty loaf of bread between myself and Fial, completing the frugal meal with a few slivers of cheese that had been keeping for weeks in the cold climate. He seemed pleased with the meal, and made only one request after I told him rather bluntly that my plans for the day did not include him. “I’d like to read,” he remarked brightly, “anything you have, if I may.”

I found a stack of literary journals in one of the storage closets, and brought them to his room. He smiled so graciously, I wanted to shake the politeness right out of him. Confusion was in my nature, but violence, fortunately, was not. I sighed away my frustration as I descended the steps, wrapping a second curtain around my neck when I felt the cold through the cracks in the doors. I used curtains and tablecloths where clothes now failed to be in my budget—the linens in the living room where I lived were slightly mildewed blue jacquard, and they broke the chill of the wind like no jacket I could have purchased from the grey-market dealers in the Caverns.

Nangi was bound to appreciate my makeshift couture, I smiled to consider when I settled into my seat at my usual table. She would be on for her last set in a matter of minutes, following the fiddle player who seemed to have been on as rigorous a performance schedule as she was. The music filled the air with sharp, screaming strings, as chilling as the ghosts outside my window but not quite as unwelcome. I closed my eyes and listened to the breakneck pace of the rhythm, so closely that I could hear the player breathing and tapping his foot in time just a few feet from where I sat. His dark hair was hanging in front of his dark eyes when he finished his rendition of something by Saint Saens, and I knew as I applauded his efforts that he, like Nangi, had once been a promising bastion of his art. I clapped a little harder until Nangi took the stage, not failing to notice when the roughly handsome musician looked back at me and gave me a most unusual smile.

~*~

“What’s his name? The fiddle player, I mean.”

“That’s just Xanis.” Nangi wiped sweat from the back of her neck with a napkin and fell into the chair across from me just in time for last call. The Mourning Glory only closed for two hours every night, enough time for the chores to be done and the money to be counted and safely deposited. The regulars often stayed behind even when the doors were ceremoniously shut, and we had grown to consider ourselves the unofficial night security of the bar.

“He smiled at me,” I muttered, trying to sound disinterested. I knew my suspicions had been running high ever since Fial’s arrival, but I certainly didn’t need my little siren getting wind of it, “like he knew me from somewhere.”

“Maybe he does.” She replied, shrugging, “you’re more well-known than you think. Loners often are.”

I simply gave her a soft glare, not wanting to press the issue. She added a clincher:

“Or maybe he just finds you attractive. Why not, he’s slept with everyone else in town.” And I knew the subject was as good as dead. I left it that way, even though I was intrigued by the tone of bitterness in Nangi’s voice when she said this.

“Tired?” I asked her.

“A little, yes,” She had lit up a cigarette hastily as she joined me, and it was already smoked down to the filter. She stubbed it out firmly in the ashtray and sighed, “not enough to sleep, though. Just body fatigue.”

When the Snakes took blood, they took on a world of problems to go along with the fleeting joy. The energy lasted for days—in Nangi’s case, it faded faster as she got older—and it kept them awake whether they wanted to be or not. It was mental hyperactivity, preventing their minds from stopping long enough to settle into a lull of slumber. There were days when she called it a welcome side effect; there were days when she called it a necessary curse.

I watched a few ashes floating in the air from her cigarette, settling on her hair as she blinked her kohl-crusted eyes and shot me a sideways glance. “You?”

“I’m not tired yet, but I do need to visit someone.” I nodded my head gently to the side, subtly indicating the far wall of the bar, a shadowed enclave where café-style tables formed something like a sovereign coffee house in the midst of all the hedonism. There the bohemians dwelt, sipping flavored teas and soaking their minds in literature. A single figure remained, hunched over one of the iron-wrought little tables, flipping through an oversized book. Another regular. Exactly the man I needed to see.

Nangi looked back at me, a twitch of her eyebrow punctuating an otherwise bemused expression. “You only go to see Ausine when you need something.”

“Maybe I need something.”

“And you never tell me what’s going on when you go to see him, either.”

Her words were easily said, ripened by so many long months of friendship and dependence. It made me warm when I needed it the most. “Maybe you’re best being surprised, and maybe you’re best not to ask so many questions.” I looked up at her from under my brow as I traced ellipses in the sweat puddles from my beer glass. As I might have expected, she only clucked her tongue, rolled her eyes, and smiled.

“It wasn’t even a question.” She mumbled smartly, grinning as I shot her a poisonously sarcastic smirk.

“Where are you off to, then?” I tilted my head and watched her shake some shape back into her dreadlocks. All this time, and she refused to cut them off, even though they weighed her head like bricks some nights.

“I would have liked to spend some time with you,” she prodded me as if I were capable of the emotional obligation she tried to guilt me into believing, “but since you have other plans I guess I’ll just hang around the attic. Maybe I’ll write a bit.” She yawned. She yawned frequently after taking blood.

The attic was where she lived—a small cluster of apartments above ground, accessible from the Mourning Glory. It was where she kept what life she had left—a satchel of memories, a closet of moth-eaten clothes, and boxes full of notebooks filled with scribbled poetry. I expressed my distaste for poetry rather early into our acquaintance, and she never burdened me with a recitation or a plea for feedback. I did, however, encourage her attempts whenever I could. People like Nangi needed something to feel they were leaving behind. Dragons were just like that, whether she wanted to admit the genetic leftovers or not.

“I hope you do.”

“When will you be home?” She asked gently, smiling at me as coy as a schoolgirl. I sometimes wanted to pinch that expression from her face, it was so compelling at all the wrong moments. Tonight, it made me chuckle.

“I should be a few hours,” most of that time would be spent walking, “you can head out to the airstrip later—I’ll bring home some wine.”

She seemed satisfied by this, if smugly so.

~*~

Sir Ausine Harthlind, so called ‘Sir’ as a holdover from his days of professorship at the Valeyria Institute of Science and Technology, made his home in a private cavern in the very midst of the underground Market district. He seemed to prefer it that way, being a man of exquisite brain power that somehow required a cacophony of surrounding distractions in order to sort itself out. He was a technomage, by trade, rising above the ranks of poverty that would otherwise have haunted him, lest his hands not been blessed with the invaluable art of filtering the soul from the sky. To touch him was to feel it run all through you—a static shock with an after-effect of light nausea, something he tried to avoid by wearing gloves at all times he came into social dealings, which he did not very often. Ausine seemed to think that he would live forever, and he was probably right. He seemed the least sickly of anyone I knew, with the least disconcerting array of vices. These days, he busied himself as a private consultant where matters of medicine and psychosis were involved. I tried not to hold it against him, that he only served Dweller clients—he was shrewd with his money, even on the country’s deathbed, and even shrewder with his time investments.

Therefore, I was a bit shocked that he had time for me at all that night. I followed him out of the sickening dazzle of lights in Nangi’s bar, and into the musty corridor of the Cavern Causeway. It was a hub of underground traffic, wide as a river and welcoming the passage of everyone who entered. Panhandlers begged in a half-alive state against the sweating walls as thieves wove themselves through the tableau of flowing bodies in motion. Ausine would not have been the target for robbery that most Dwellers were. He bore the shifty eyes and heavy stride of a street hustler, which I had to believe he might have been once in his prime. His clothes were even older and more threadbare than mine; the only article of clothing he treated with any respect were his black leather gloves, which he kept carefully tucked into his pockets as he walked, two steps ahead of me through the crowd. A frayed wool cap he had pulled down to his ears, but tufts of red hair poked out down to his neck, all woven into short, thin twists of tangled dreadlocks.

He was only nine months my senior, but at times I felt as if he had lived a thousand years more. Technomages often possessed all the mental faculties and innate capabilities of my species, but also came equipped with the spirit and heart-fire of powerful emotion. Over the course of our strange friendship I’d watched Ausine throw himself into fits of near-dementia thanks to problems I could only imagine. The potency of such deep emotion was enthralling to me, and so I loved to watch him—stronger and more level-headed than Nangi, with an even wider range of eccentricities.

His fondness for the Causeway was one of the idiosyncracies I never quite understood. He would have made a perfect double agent in his time, the way he loved to slip into the ranks of Valeyria’s dregs and experience for himself how the other half lived. I recalled an occasion when, upon waking in his home I left to find him sleeping in the Causeway among the junkies and the beggars, simply because his idea of true freedom ran in ways too extreme for me to fathom.

As we passed a mother kneeling near the wall, her gaunt face pinched in agony as a tiny baby suckled her breast, he pulled me close and sighed wistfully. “Do you know how many mothers would have thrown a child away in this city, now? The baby may not live two more weeks, and she barely has enough nutrients in her to sustain her own life, but look at her—that’s desperation not only to survive, but to bestow survival. She’s heroic. I admire her.”

I turned my face away from the gangly mother and her dying child, trying to feel the warmth of Ausine’s arm over my shoulder as a comforting thing. But I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but anxiety in that place. My throat tightened and I felt my eyes trying to close before they welled with tears of panic.

Finally, I crossed the threshold into the large earthen cubby hole that Ausine called his home. It was well-lit and humming with sounds of all sorts. Electricity hurt my eyes in such vast quantities, and I immediately took a seat to catch my bearings as he made a brisk entrance.

Ausine’s fingers were long under his gloves, to match his arms and legs. Every bit of him was slim and compact, stretched to the perfect median between petite and lanky. As captivating as he had been to his students, I was often wont to wonder whether that was due to his absurdly passionate teaching methods, or his absurdly flamboyant carriage. He gestured like a dancer and moved like a cat, never slumping and never seeming to stumble in words or in stride. His face would be cherubic and innocent if it weren’t for the slinky eyebrows and the thin, bowed lips that almost always found themselves in the twist of a bemused smirk. And his eyes, sparkling with shades of blue as dazzling as neon, made him seem even childlike. But under the guise of precocious arrogance, Ausine’s vast variety of skills was littered with the occasional deadly art. He was well-trained with swords, almost exclusively, enjoying their feel and the weight and power they wielded. He had never, to my knowledge, been given cause to harm another being, but something told me a deeper part of his rarely-explored subconscious thrilled at the idea of always being a little more powerful than those around him.

I watched him hanging his overcoat on a hook by the door, and smiled to myself. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“I’d diagnosed that some while ago.” He caught his breath from the walk and swept his mop of locks back across his head.

Sprawled as I was on the worn velvet cushions of his parlor chair, I took the opportunity to reply with a well-timed yawn. “Quite pithy. Now, I’d like you to tell me a little, if you can, about this.”

My flair for drama was often underestimated thanks to my genetic handicap of species and disposition. I mirrored his arrogant smirk as I handed him the thin-stitched leather wallet belonging to Fial Beyalyn.

Ausine was considered something of a master of antiquities, a curator of culture in and around Valeyria. His memory was immense; his eye for detail, profound. If anyone was bound to recognize the origin of my bizarre houseguest, it would be Sir Harthlind.

He handled it with immediate interest and glided into the receiving room. Every inch of space in Ausine’s home was filled to the brim with possessions—most were antiques, but the occasional high-tech gadget crept in unnoticed amidst the delicate charcoal drawings and the musty-smelling books he’d acquired during his lifetime. He had lived in the Caverns before the bomb, and so kept his home exactly as it always had been. He was one of the truly lucky ones, and I thought myself fortunate by association, every time I walked inside the carnival of wonders that was his residence.

“Where did you find this?” He asked, understandably disinterested. He still had not examined its contents, I noticed, as he was busying his senses with the study of the wallet itself, “it’s foreign, and designer at that. I haven’t seen leathercraft like this in Valeyria for months. Whoever you lifted this off of had to have been in his finery.”

I snorted. Surely, Fial was in his finery, wearing a three piece suit that would fetch a fortune these days, but the truth was no real consolation to the shock I was saving my friend from. “A stranger. I found him two nights ago, on the street. I’m taking care of him now.”

This caught Ausine’s attention. I kept my eyes set on the inlaid mother of pearl on an heirloom Swiss Cuckoo clock as I heard the wallet flip open slowly in his hands. Slow motion realization always made me a tad nervous. I had been told before, by Ausine if I recalled correctly, that I was the sort who demanded instant gratification for my efforts. Anticipation and moments of contemplation were too much to bear, coming from others. It was easy to call it a throwback from the psychic days I couldn’t remember. I longed to know what reactions beset the minds of my companions, and now I was dying to hear every siren going off in the redheaded professor’s mind.

“Ontameni.” He breathed.

“He found me quite by accident,” I muttered, winding the heavy minute hand counter clockwise on the broken timepiece, past nine o’clock before I let it dangle dead to point at an eternal 6:30, “still I don’t know what to do with him.”

“How did he get here?” Ausine took a seat on the Queen Anne fainting couch he so treasured, and pressed a fist to his mouth as he studied the ID card I had already obsessed over.

“I don’t know.”

“Did he say?”

“He doesn’t know either. He claims he doesn’t. But—Ausine—“ I breezed from one Oriental rug to the other on his floor, sighing as I tried to organize my explanation, “he was walking when I found him. But that night—when he regained consciousness—“

“He was unconscious?”

“Yes. He just sort of…fainted…and I carried him home. But the point is, I saw him walking, but later that night, he was paralyzed. Paralyzed from the waist down, a complete invalid. He claims he’s been that way forever. That’s all he remembers. Well, he remembers he’s supposed to be in Valeyria.”

“He’s crippled.” In my experience, doctors were often the least polite arbiters of the handicapped. They had no reason to treat any malady with kid gloves.

“Yes. Completely, no mistaking it.”

Ausine let out a conflicted sigh and stared into the eyes of the ID photo. I walked onto a third Oriental rug, the largest one that laid in front of his fireplace. It was a broad, custom fireplace, carved from marble and limestone to present a scene from the Book of Revelation. The Seven Trumpets, Ausine had explained once, but I’d never taken much care to read the Bible. My interest in speculation, as I’ve said before, was limited, and religion was nothing more than theory to me. Above the marble relief of angels and demons, icons and triptychs lined the mantle, watched over by a sheathed longsword that seemed most curious of all Ausine’s oddities. I’d always wanted to handle that sword in particular—it hung segregated from the rest of Ausine’s collection, which numbered in the dozens—but he’d never let me. Knowing my skill with a sword, more precisely that there was none, he was quite right for the prohibition. I ran my fingers over the carved sheath and waited for him to speak.

“What do you expect I can tell you about this?” He finally snapped, his tone colder than usual. I turned my head and met his gaze, a little stunned at the abrasiveness, “the wallet’s custom crafted, yes, but it’s not so unusual that one guild from one city in the entire nation would produce it. The ID is national, with no address given. Even if I could tell you where he came from, I doubt you’d be able to do anything about it.”

“I’m not the sort who would do anything about it, regardless.” I assured him, “I just thought it might interest you.”

“It does. In the same way that disease and bacterial mutation interests me. This is a bad thing, Ontameni, whatever it is.”

“How do you know that? His name is Fial, it’s not just a thing. I’ve become a bit fond of him, actually.”

“You?” He snorted, falling back against the wall, “since when have you been hospitable to company?”

“I’ve never quite had the chance to see if it suited me, but come to find it almost does.”

“Almost?”

“He upsets my routine, but little more. Our conversations have been illuminating.”

“He remembers nothing of who he is, where he came from?”

I shook my head.

Ausine slapped his knees lightly. “Well there’s no telling if he’s a spy sent by someone, now, is there? Maybe they’re planning on bombing us the rest of the way into the stone age. Maybe he’s here to scout for survivors.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you.”

I left it to Ausine to be the quick-thinking one who jumped to irrational conclusions that only seemed to make sense the longer you thought about them while you tried to fall asleep. He was a theorist, I assured myself, but I remained convinced that he could help me.

Abandoning the far-fetched ideas for a moment, I steered the conversation back to my stomping ground of fact. “Are you positive there aren’t any ways in or out of the city?”

“Absolutely. Valeyria’s a peninsula, anyway, but even the routes to the shore are blocked. Not impossible, just obstacles you wouldn’t want to attempt without a very good reason for coming or going. The land-side, you know, that’s the worst…”

He trailed off purposefully. I knew all about the land-side border of Valeyria, what we now called the Dead Gates. Nothing but a small mountain of dead bodies, explainable only as the remains of those who tried to flee in the aftermath of all the destruction. No one ever took the time to examine them more closely. The roads weren’t very friendly outside of Valeyria, anyway, and lingering was not foremost in the minds of those scared senseless at first sight of the Dead Gates.

Suddenly, he spoke again. “Don’t you see, Ontameni? It wasn’t the bomb that caused all this. All this is what caused the bomb. Valeyria is a corpse, and someone—possibly everyone—is trying to bury it. We’re still hundreds strong—a population of plague sowers. We’re being sacrificed for the good of everyone else.”

I was silent, studying the hand-woven patterns on the rug beneath my feet as I considered his testimony. “Even if you’re right,” I finally replied, “I don’t think Fial has anything to do with that.”

“You’d be surprised at the power one person can wield.” He remarked sagely, glancing off as if voicing the bit of hackneyed wisdom as nothing more than a time-filler. I resisted the temptation to follow his gaze, but finally did, relieved to find that he was only staring down a Sargaent painting with a somber, doleful expression. The elaborately framed reproduction print, I’d noticed, was his icon of late, something he got lost in when he needed to reflect and evaluate. The figure of Miss Eden sat eternally rendered in watercolour, glaring daringly back at Ausine, her bold red hair mirroring his. Her challenging, skeptical expression was so like his; almost forlorn in its intensity. Ausine would be lost if not in contemplation, but I always felt burdened by some guilt for bringing him into my personal quandaries.

“Would you meet him, if I asked you to?” It had taken me the whole of our evening together to arrive at my point. The way Ausine regarded it with outward nonchalance seemed to make the labor of timing seem wasted.

He stared into Miss Eden’s eyes and gave a half-shrug. “I suppose, though what good it would do, I’m wondering.”

I nodded, my thinking too slow to formulate a quick reply. Perhaps it was for the best.

“Would you fight for Valeyria, Ausine? To live another day, would you fight for this place? Even with all the disease and the despair, even without any hope of a legacy, would you?”

Even I was amazed I had said it. Ausine seemed less jarred, almost as if he’d been considering the very same thing. His response came quickly enough, his tone inspired, confident.

“Of course. I’d fight, I’d die if I had to, to see you and Nangi and everyone else survive.”

“Why?” I hissed softly, failing once again in an endless string of futile attempts at understanding, “why go on living, why feel attached at all? What could possibly be left here?”

Only nine months my senior. This was one of those moments when Ausine seemed like a wise old man by comparison. He turned his head slowly and looked at me, staring at me over a pair of wire-rimmed half moon spectacles. “Existentialism isn’t so hard to grasp, my dear little Ganie. It’s as logical as you can imagine. Existence is the only thing we have, the only thing we truly own, that is ours until the very end. Isn’t that worth protecting? Isn’t that worth celebrating and not giving up on?”

“Then why does it hurt so much, sometimes?” I felt like a child who was letting the ghosts win.

Ausine blinked once, twice, and slowly turned his head to look back at Miss Eden. I noticed a smirk on his lips that widened to form a very soft, grandfatherly smile. “Nothing worth having ever comes easy, Ontameni. I want you to remember that,” I couldn’t tell if he was still smiling, but I easily assumed so, “it just might crop up again.”