Chapter 3
Night had lowered the temperature outside, but not enough, and as they began walking Avery started to sweat again, and his shirt stuck to his back between his shoulder blades. He was all too aware that he hadn’t been able to find any deodorant in the city. Luckily (or not), few of the locals seemed to be users of the substance, and various bodily odors assaulted him as he and the ring-lipped fellow slipped their way through the nighttime crowd.
Of course, there weren’t just locals here. Despite the fighting, there were more than a few foreigners come to enjoy the unique splendors of the Maze, though the tourists looked a seedy and hard-bitten lot to be sure. Is that what I look like now? Avery wondered. Have I become the disreputable world-traveler? It wouldn’t surprise him.
Not all of those they passed were human. Once Avery brushed up against something, then had to recoil in horror. It was a seven-foot-tall, vaguely human-shaped thing, and it seemed to be fashioned of dark mud and clay, at least upon closer inspection; Avery’s first shocked thought that it was a burnt human corpse somehow still alive. He couldn’t tell if any awareness stirred in the back of its deep-set, dark-as-pitch eye sockets, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“That was a homunculus,” his guide said as they continued on. “You don’t see many of them around, not east of the Toresthi.”
“Homunculi,” Avery muttered. “Yes, I’ve heard of them. Aren’t they made by the Guild of Alchemists in the city of—what is it?—Lavorgna?” It was a place Avery had read about but knew little of, the capital of the Confederation of Wallach, located many thousands of miles away on the coast of Gostrath, the continent separated from Consur by the Toreshti Mountains. The War of Octung had yet to reach Gostrath, except along the coasts.
“I’m sure it belongs to one of the Guildsmen,” the ring-lipped man said. “Probably about some errand. Alchemists come from all over the world to study our secrets here—learn of some new technique or alchemical source element.”
“Like the ghost flower.”
“Exactly. Though that’s rather well-known these days, in no small part to my boss.”
Avery cast his guide a sideways glance. “Just what’s your name, anyway?”
“Call me Yoi.”
Avery’s attention fixed on a certain structure down a side-street, a squat, bulbous-looking building with an ornate façade and sinister-sounding music flooding from its open doors. Seeing the line of his gaze, Yoi said, “That’s a chapel to the gods of the Restoration. They’re a new cult in town. Don’t know much about them, but what I do know freaks me out.”
Avery remembered the hooded and robed priests smelling of rot at the Sisters’ temple. “You’re not the only one.”
“Here, this way.”
Yoi led up a dark alley. Avery hesitated, staring at the moss-covered alley walls but unable to make out much else. The alchemical lamps that lit the main street did not cast much illumination upon the alley, and Yoi hunched in shadow, not even his eyes, hidden as they were, visible as he turned back to face Avery.
“Well?”
Avery shoved a hand into his pocket and curled his fingers around the pistol. “Lead on.”
He followed as Yoi led him up the alley, then down another. At last they pushed in through the rear entrance of what turned out to be a sex club. If Avery had thought it was hot outside, it was nothing compared to the sultry, overheated interior of the establishment. Deep, stringy music played as he and Yoi emerged into a large room draped in darkness and wreathed with smoke from a myriad of cigars and cigarettes. Some of the smoke glimmered faintly and moved in strange patterns. The patrons—at least some of them—smoked something alchemical, Avery knew. They looked both dazed and entranced as they beheld the main event.
On a raised stage of sorts, several young men and women were engaged in an elaborate sex dance, moving languidly against each other as sweat rolled down their dark, glistening bodies. The stage below them was of stone, and it seemed to be alchemically heated; steam rose off of it, enveloping the performers, who half-danced, half-fucked as the mist drew beads of sweat from their pores and, Avery felt sure, clouded their minds with alchemical rapture. They were all beautiful, and all adorned with glowing tattoos which bobbed and flowed strangely in the mist-veiled erotic dance. Suddenly the deep, low plunking of the strings stopped, and rapid drumbeats replaced it. The lighting changed, became redder, and the performers ceased their slow movements and began pumping and thrusting and grinding their hips against each other at greater speed. A collective moan rose from the watchers.
“This way,” Yoi told Avery, shaking him out of a reverie, and marched up a curling, winding staircase. Dully, Avery followed. He thought he might have inhaled too much of that smoke—either that, or the dance had distracted him. Yoi showed him to the second floor and down a hall. Grunts and groans sounded from rooms to either side. At the end of the hall, they took a turn and entered a quieter area, and at the end of this passage Yoi knocked on a door, one rap, then three fast knocks.
“Come in,” said a voice, and Yoi cracked the door and beckoned Avery to follow him.
Avery blinked in the darkness, but then his eyes began to adjust. There were three sources of light in the room: two orange alchemical lanterns whose fluid moved with glacial slowness, casting roiling shadows across the walls, and a stout black man who must be Losgana Coleel himself. He was naked, so Avery could see just how many tattoos he bore (or could have had he cared to count), and there were quite a lot.
Coleel proved to be a man in late middle age, somewhat taller than average and with his belly, which once seemed to have been quite taut, going to fat. His face and bald head were clean-shaven to better display his tattoos (and the rest of him was shaven, too—every inch), and each one glowed. He had become his own best marketing tool. His entire naked, gleaming body was covered in tattoos each glowing a slightly different color, and the tattoos moved as he moved, leaving afterimages in Avery’s eyes. And Coleel did move, making love as he did to two separate women—girls, really. Both seemed to be enjoying it.
No one bothered to speak or look at Avery and Yoi, at least until they were done. Then, panting, the young women gathered their clothes and some money, which had been left on the counter, and made their way out, giggling as they left.
“Now,” said the blazing shape that must be Coleel, sitting up in bed and lighting an alchemical cigar; Avery could tell it was alchemical because the flame burned blue. “You must be the foreigner who’s been asking all over for me.”
Avery cleared his throat. He and Yoi had taken a seat, and Avery had been lost in a daydream, waiting for the threesome to finish. In his dream, it had been he and Layanna and Sheridan in the bed together.
“Yes,” he said. “I needed to find you.”
“Well? Yes?”
Avery cleared his throat. “Actually, my friends and I have come a great distance and overcome many obstacles to find you.”
Coleel grinned. “You are clearly not a negotiator. A negotiator would start by sounding uninterested, not desperate.”
Do I sound so desperate? Avery tried to sound more casual. “We need to locate a great deal of ghost flower nectar—fresh, if possible.”
Coleel studied him. “I would’ve let you go on embarrassing yourself if I’d had any to sell. It would only have driven the price higher. Sadly, I sold the last of it some weeks ago. The prices had gotten ridiculously high, what with the shortages brought about by the war, and I could no longer resist.” He shrugged his broad shoulders and blew a cloud of smoke against the ceiling, where it spread outward in a loose star pattern, then broke up. Avery thought of the Starfish even then driving toward the coast.
“There must be some way,” he said. “You must have a hidden store, something.”
“I’m afraid not.” Throwing, at last, a silken sheet around his middle, he nodded to Yoi. “Fetch me some food, will you?”
Yoi nodded and moved away, leaving Avery and Coleel alone. Avery hoped this would be the time when Coleel would confess to having exactly what Avery needed, but Coleel only smoked and looked contented. At last, though, he frowned.
“Why is the nectar in such demand at the moment? I had to go on the run, my whole life disrupted, once I learned the Octunggen wanted it. Then I hear about you asking around. I realized you couldn’t be with them but must represent some separate group, also interested in the nectar. Tell me, what am I missing?”
“Ah.” Avery nodded. “That’s why you were willing to see me.”
Coleel waggled his cigar. “Would you like one? They’re quite nice—and expensive, I don’t mind saying. I may be on the run and in hiding, but there’s no reason not to enjoy oneself, is there?”
