Beasts Made of Night Read online

  And I’m back.

  Bits of shadow dribble down the sides of my mouth, and I wipe the rest of the sin away with the back of my hand. I hear echoes of the sin in my mind, but I quickly shake my head to keep them from taking hold. I don’t need to know who did what to whom. What’s done is done. I’m just here to Eat the sin and get paid. In the beginning, I’d lie on the floor for half an hour after Eating, shivering until my teeth were ready to fall out of my mouth. Now I’m up in less than five minutes.

  I walk over to the locked doors and pound on them once, twice, to let Izu and the Palace guards know that I’ve finished. I Ate the sin, the sin didn’t eat me. I did what Jai couldn’t do, what no other aki except me could do.

  When the doors swing open, I see the fear and horror on the faces of the Palace guards as they take in the room behind me. Only Izu’s face remains impassive, looking at me like I’m something disposable. Like a rusting hammer or a nail that’ll eventually bend.

  I’ve gotten used to it.

  Next to Izu stands a golden-haired princeling that I recognize with surprise as Prince Haris. Probably sixth or seventh in line for the throne, but still royal. I bow my head quickly, but not before catching a glimpse of his cold stare. He must have arrived when I was in there battling the sin-beast. His sin-beast.

  Coins jingle, there’s a flash of gold, then a metal tab is shoved into the palm of my hand. I get a second to look at the marking on it. It’s not enough time to tell how much I’ve been paid, just that I’ve been shorted. Before I can say anything, the guards are on me and I’m shoved back outside, nearly losing my tab in the process.

  I spit a few times to try to forget the taste of the sin in my mouth, then walk down the path to the Palace’s front gates, where Bo is waiting to walk me home. A rare smile splits his face, the only sign that he thought I might not return.

  By the time I reach Bo and he slaps me on the back in greeting, I feel the tattoo burn itself into existence on my forearm. This lion etched into my skin will be with me forever now, a marker of Prince Haris’s sin. Now he can walk around pure and noble and free while I carry the evidence of his crimes in my head and on my body. For a moment, I feel a heaviness. Anguish and despair from the sin wash over me, but I concentrate and push them out of my head like I’ve been taught to do, like I’ve been doing since I was nine years old.

  With my redeemable tab between my teeth, I fiddle with my hair. I need both hands to fix it, to get it to puff out the right way.

  Turns out Jai doesn’t have immediate family left, so it’s up to us to bury him. A bunch of us aki walk up to a ledge that sticks out from the earthen wall that surrounds the northern Ashara dahia like the rim of a bowl. Just beyond the wall are the mining pits, and even in the heat of midday, I see the men, black as obsidian, working the land. With coal-darkened cloth wrapped around their noses and mouths, the men climb out of the mine shafts or hand up baskets filled with what precious stones they’ve been able to find. The metallic sound of their hammers banging against stone fills the air. It’s a different kind of noisy here than in the Forum.

  Stone dwellings dot the base of the bowl, but it’s mostly huts and a few shacks with tin roofs. I can barely see the people below, small specks that dart in and out of the huts, but I know that somewhere, a goat roasts over a fire and the women are preparing to dust a young girl’s forehead with precious metals to commemorate her coming-of-age. Somewhere, her younger sisters are pounding yams and grumbling about it. Somewhere, in shadowed alleys, stone-sniffers crush rocks and sniff the small bits off the backs of their hands to forget their troubles, just for a moment. Over it all towers the massive statue of Malek, the mythic figure who, long ago, battled the arashi, the demonic monsters that descended from the sky and attacked the dahia. The sculpture is red-brown when the sun’s at this angle, and Malek’s sword arm is flung back, ready to swing a crushing blow against an invisible enemy. He’s looking skyward.

  As one of the eldest aki, Bo presides over Jai’s burial. After the aki lay Jai down next to his empty grave, it’s Bo who cuts Jai’s throat, with Jai’s own daga, and delivers him from his mind-death. I’ve got my slammers in my hand and no heart for burials, but I figure I owe it to the aki to at least be around. It doesn’t take a miner or farmer to tell where the earth in this part of the dahia has been recently turned. No grave markers signal where aki have been put into the ground, but the grass avoids them. Avoids us.

  We bury Jai with his dull stones in his ear.

  Inyo flit through the air like black bursts of wind, then vanish, and I feel Jai among them.

  Bo begins singing in a loud, clear voice, but I can’t catch the words, only the rhythm. He starts the dance, and the other aki join. Jai’s inyo dances with them.

  The lion on my wrist burns, like all new marks do. I feel a pang in my stomach, and at first I think it’s because I’m watching another aki get buried, but then I realize that I haven’t eaten all day.

  As the burial ends, I scrabble up over the edge of the Ashara wall in search of pepper soup.

  Balance is supposed to be the principle that governs us. Sin and sacrifice. Night and day. Death and life. I get to the top of the ridge, and there’s a kid standing there with his eyes closed, almost like he’s waiting for me.

  There’s no expression on his face, but there are tearstains on his cheek. His clothes hang off him: a robe full of holes, billowy pants, all the color of mud. Must’ve been on the streets for at least a week. Probably twice that, by the looks of it. He looks like he’s dreaming. His arms are folded tight around his chest, and his eyes are closed.

  “Ay!” I step to him. My shadow looms. “You lost?”

  This snaps the kid out of his trance, and he starts to shiver. He doesn’t even look like he has a home to run away from. Maybe there’s a place for him with Auntie Sania and Auntie Nawal at the marayu with the rest of Kos’s orphans.

  “Hey. What’s your name?”

  The kid opens his eyes, and that’s when I see it. White pupils. His irises are brown, but right in the center of each is a flaming sun. He’s an aki. I don’t see a sin on him, which means his eyes have changed only recently.

  Whenever the preachers in the Forum talk about Balance and the Unnamed and sin and purity, it’s all lahala. But we barely finish burying Jai and then this kid suddenly shows up. Maybe this is what they’re talking about when they talk about Balance. One leaves. Another one arrives.

  “Omar,” the kid says. “My name is Omar.”

  I hold my hand out, palm up. “To you and your people, Omar,” I say.

  It takes the kid a moment, but then he slides his hand over mine. It’s coated in dust, and dirt clings to his fingernails. “To you and yours, sir.”

  “Taj,” I tell him. “The name’s Taj.” Without thinking, I put my hand to his head and rustle his nappy hair. “You’re aki now. Let’s go meet your brothers and sisters.” I turn back and lead him down the hill.

  The pepper soup isn’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER 2

  EVERY SINGLE TIME I return to the Forum, the noise hits me like a wall. In less than a minute, my sandaled feet are covered in dirt and grime. I’m hoping the open air and the sun will help me clear my head and the pepper soup will warm my body. I look at the new lion tattooed into my forearm. It still burns. Prince Haris’s sin is staying with me longer than usual, which, I guess, isn’t surprising considering how big that inisisa was.

  The roar of the crowd settles into a muffled quiet, but if I strain, I can pick out a snatch of conversation about someone’s cousins coming to visit or about the rising price of dates. Northern and southern Kosian accents mingle together. Above it all, a crier stands off to the side of the thoroughfare, singing holy verse in a voice that booms out over the crowd.

  Farther down, the smells announce the open market. A mix of imported herbs, the syrupy sweetness of deep-fried puff puff,
the tingling spiciness of pepper soup with fufu. Stray too far, however, and it all starts to smell like sweet-sour refuse.

  Between the jeweler stalls, glinting with crystals and rings too bright and numerous to be real, are the booktraders. They display their forbidden wares over spread cloth, ready to be snatched up at a moment’s notice. The books are mostly different versions of the Word, the holy text that governs our lives. The pages are folded into cylinders, and you put the book to one eye to watch the text spiral and form new words as you read. Some cylinders are simple, tough leather fabric with black ink. Others are more colorful and ornate, displaying flamboyant curving script. I’ve looked through enough of these vessels to know that half of them contain not religious doctrine but secret histories, forbidden alternate tellings of the origins of Kos, of the world, texts proclaiming that sin can’t be bought or sold or Eaten.

  I spot a kid twirling one of the books in his hands. He’s got the thing pressed up against his face, burying his nose in it. I lean back a little bit and can see that the insides don’t have words but drawings. I know this book. This booktrader sells adventures: young aki questing to find a magical amulet to purify all their sins or something like that.

  Two stalls down, past the herb seller, is a guy who sells stories of princes and princesses who look a lot like the Kayas. They’re never named, but everyone in Kos knows who the prince is that got caught in another lady’s bedchamber in last week’s installment. It was probably Haris. The real people in Kos, the people getting dirty in the Forum, the people trying to make their way through the dozen or so languages being spoken at any time, they know the royal family isn’t pure. We all know. Many of us Eat their sins. We just have to pretend they’re pure as river water so we don’t get strung up by the gates in front of our families, and so I can keep earning ramzi coins to send back to my family.

  “Oya, child, buy it or leave. This is not a library.” The bookseller snatches the book out of the kid’s hand, careful not to crush the cylinder. I glare at him and dig into my pocket to find the marker from Izu. I’ll pay for the damn book. Let the kid enjoy his adventures.

  But then I pull the marker out and suck my teeth. He shorted me even more than I thought. This is barely enough for me to send back home to my family. For a second, I think about tracking him down and chopping his hand for chopping my coins, but then I’d have no more work because I’d be dead.

  Suddenly, the bookseller lets out a low whistle and shoots me a pointed look. Then, he settles into a bored gaze, staring off into the distance, but his hands move fast as a goat-fly trying not to get swatted. I see him sliding some cylinders under others, and then he shoves some of them into his rucksack entirely. I hear more low whistles, and I turn to see another bookseller doing the same furtive shuffling, and farther down another. When I hear the clank of armored boots, I understand.

  An Agha glides through the crowd, almost as though she’s not even walking in the mud, leading a phalanx of other guards. She wears the ruby-red double-sash of higher officers. The Palace guards behind her are nothing but foot soldiers behind a general. She’s staring straight ahead, but everyone knows that they’ve been seen. The booksellers stare down at their wares, and the guards continue past the intersection before being swallowed up by the crowd.

  The little kid is still sniffling over having his book snatched away by the booktrader. He probably has no idea the booktrader just saved his life. Who knows what the Agha would have done if she had found the kid spiraling through illegal stories?

  I ruffle the kid’s hair and duck down an alleyway to make my way home, ignoring the conmen and hucksters that line the shadowy paths: soothsayers promising to read your future for a few ramzi, scammers offering secret cures for those afflicted by physical or spiritual ailments.

  Down a side street I overhear a woman pleading with a trader, clutching her shawl close to her chest. “Please, trader, my son, he is beset by sins.” She’s on the verge of tears. “For many years, he has not been able to lift himself from his bed. And he weeps. Always, he weeps, and yet there is no wound on his body.”

  I stiffen when I hear this. I should walk away. It’s not my problem. But the more I listen, the angrier I get. I’ve seen this before.

  I was much younger. Up to Baba’s knees maybe. I clung to his pant leg as he haggled with a Mage to purchase a cure for Mama. A small flock of children hid in the shadows where Baba spoke with the Mage. I remember the Mage called one of them forward, a tiny girl a little taller than me at the time. Sin-spots ran up and down her arms. And I knew it was for Mama, who had been sick for almost a month, bedridden with a sin that none of us could absolve her of.

  Even after all these years, Mama and Baba are still in debt.

  I want to help this woman, but I would need a Mage to call forth the sin, and that would mean breaking my contract with Izu.

  “It is the guilt that is weighing on his soul,” the woman in the market pleads. “Please, save my son. We cannot afford an aki. My son will die for want of cleansing, his inyo haunting my home.” The poor woman falls to her knees in the mud.

  I listen with gritted teeth as the trader promises a cure that will wash away all her doubts and restore her son, rescue him from the guilt that plagues him. I start at the sharp pain in my hand. There’s blood running down my fingers. I’ve been gripping my daga.

  The woman pulls out a small purse and slowly counts the ramzi in her palm, then looks at the trader who nudges her on with a lifting of the chin. She hesitates, then pulls out a few more ramzi, counts them. Her purse is nearly empty.

  It’s all I can do not to take my daga and carve the greedy look off that trader’s face. The trader hands her a small vial, which the woman cradles in both hands before secreting it up her sleeve. Relief washes over her face, and she hurries away, head bowed.

  I watch her go, then whip back and start toward the trader. He smirks at me, all traces of false concern gone from his face now that he’s made his sale. He glances down at my exposed tattoos, and his grin grows wider. He knows there’s nothing I can do, that it would be his word against mine, and who would believe an aki? The trader spits at my feet, sticks a rolled sijara in his mouth, then walks back into the crowd.

  I push through the crush of bodies in the thoroughfare and follow him. I make sure to push up my sleeves so that people can see my sin-spots. The crowd parts immediately. Most Forum dwellers avoid touching aki, convinced that the guilt and anguish and weight of the sin could somehow transfer to them. It’s a bunch of lahala, but it’s useful in times like this.

  As I get closer to the trader, I try not to choke on the smoke of his sijara billowing behind him.

  Now I’m right behind the trader. Leading with my shoulder, I crash right into him. The trader stumbles and falls to the ground. His sijara tumbles into the dust.

  “You!” he growls as he picks himself up, angrily brushing off his sleeves.

  “Please, sir. My apologies.” I bow, lowering my eyes respectfully as he lets out a string of curses.

  I wait till I can hear him walking away before straightening up. The trader’s full sack of money fills my entire palm. The ramzi would feed the woman and her son for a very long time. But she might also get tricked out of it by another trader. Mama and Baba need the ramzi too. I slip the trader’s bulging purse up my sleeve.

  I make my way back through the crowd, ignoring the dirty looks of the Forum dwellers who glare at my sin-spots. Their hisses follow me through the winding streets and back alleys until I reach the outskirts of the Forum. Here, the dahia I call my home stretches out before me: a small hill crushed between the outer walls of two neighboring dahia; rusted, falling-apart buildings stacked on top of one another and too many people living in too little space. Intoxicated stone-sniffers sharing alley-space with pickpockets and cutpurses. I cover my nose and mouth with my shawl, then march through the pathways where thieves and cutpurses cro
uch or wait or idle. My feet avoid the empty vials and glass bottles by instinct. Same with the rivers of waste that flow down the center of these paths. I’ve been following this route home since I was a child. I could find my way back blindfolded.

  Eventually, the narrow path leads me up a hill where I get a better view of the mud-colored shanties. The tin roofs glint red in the dying sun. Up the hill the dwellings climb, as far as I can see, and I catch myself smiling. Home.

  But first I need to see Nazim the money broker. The ramzi is burning a hole in my pocket, and at least some of it needs to get to Mama and Baba.

  CHAPTER 3

  BEING AN AKI does carry certain advantages.

  The line to see Nazim trails down several storefronts and around the corner from a butcher’s stall, so by the time I reach his stall, the flies buzzing around the meat decide they’d rather make a meal out of me. I’ve spent my entire life in Kos, but I’ll never get used to the pests. I could certainly do without the flies constantly feeling the need to dive deep into my ears. One catches me up the nose, and I swat at it. I swear, by the Unnamed, if survival is such a basic animal instinct, why are Forum flies so suicidal?

  Somebody jostles me from behind, and I nearly fall into the man in front of me. The line is mostly merchants, a few builders, and some younger Forum dwellers, my age or younger. I can only guess at their jobs. Servants of some Palace royal or their sister or wife. Handmaidens, some of them. Maybe a few newsboys, scurrying throughout the Forum with folded pieces of parchment that carry news from one corner of the city to the other. I’ve seen them around, darting through the legs of older Forum dwellers, the best ones able to get from one dahia to its opposite in half a day. I know Kos, but I don’t know the city as well as the newsboys do. They know every nook, every passageway, even the rumored underground tunnels, and for a second I imagine a whole legion of children crawling through passages underneath the city, bringing people news of loved ones or of new merchants arriving or of a message or sermon from a faraway holy man.