The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (26 page)

Flick wasn’t sure whether Lileem genuinely added details to his pantheon or was just making it up like a fairy story, but perhaps it didn’t matter. She was imaginative and he liked the things she invented. Lileem clearly loved the idea of the dehara and would pester Flick for stories all the time. She insisted that one night, she had seen Lunil with her own eyes. He had flown out of the moon as a flock of ghostly owls, only to transform into a silver skinned har with blue hair, who had danced in the tree outside her bedroom window and sung to her. Lunil was an especial favourite of hers. Together, she and Flick created myths. He began to teach her how to read and write, and was astounded at her brightness and eagerness to learn. Lileem practiced her new skills by making up illustrated stories about the dehara, using pencils she and Flick had found in an old desk in the house. Sometimes, they used one of her drawings as a focus during a ritual, in the way that a statue might be used. Flick told Lileem about cult statues and the harling immediately thought about how they could make their own. She used mud from the streams, but was not pleased with the results. Her fingers couldn’t reproduce the fabulous entities she saw in her head.

Lileem was a constant source of wonder to Flick. She was impossible, yet perfect, an ideal companion, who shared his new love of the mysterious and unseen. They worked well together, like a magician and his apprentice. She learned quickly. He was curious about what she actually was and for some weeks debated whether to ask her intimate questions. Eventually, he introduced the subject and found she didn’t mind talking about it. She told him that once she had thought about it all the time, how different and how similar she might be to Ulaume, but now she didn’t consider it much at all. It no longer seemed important. ‘Not since you came,’ she said. ‘You’re showing me better things.’

She looked as if she was a human child of five or so, yet her manner and her intelligence was far more mature. ‘Will you show me something, Lee?’ Flick asked. ‘I want to understand about you. Can I see what your body is like?’

She hesitated for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t feel right.’

‘That’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Perhaps when I’m older,’ she said gravely.

‘There may be others like you,’ Flick said, and Lileem cast him a strange, furtive glance.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll never know.’

Sefton Richards had owned quite an impressive library, and Flick began teaching Lileem from its books. They would sit together at the wide desk in the old dark room, with the morning light falling in upon them, making a pool of radiance near the window.

One day, Lileem pored over an old biology book, studying the diagrams of human bodies. ‘How strange to be so…’, she wrinkled up her nose, ‘
incomplete.
’

‘Perhaps you could try drawing what a har looks like, what you look like,’ Flick said carefully.

‘OK.’ She pushed her hair back behind her ears and began to draw slowly. ‘Men and women must have been really jealous of one another.’

‘That’s an interesting way of looking at things.’

Lileem grinned, because she liked compliments. Presently, she handed her drawing to Flick and he had to suppress a smile. ‘Lileem, there are all sorts of extras on this! Don’t tell me it looks like you.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s what I want to be like. We should have wings everywhere, shouldn’t we?’

‘In a perfect world, maybe! Here, let me draw something for you. I’m no artist, but it’ll give you and idea.’

Flick gave Lileem a very badly drawn diagram of Wraeththu physiology and told her to keep it. She glanced at it, folded the paper twice and put in the pocket of her trousers. Flick sensed she still felt her body was very private, perhaps because of careless things Ulaume might have said in the past. To Lileem, there was no need to dwell on what she was. She was only a child, and the vast reaches of time stretching before her obviously meant little. But Flick knew that she couldn’t hide away here forever; none of them could. They could live for a long time and eventually Wraeththu society would reach out and touch them in some way. It was not inconceivable that other hara had already been compelled to find the birthplace of Pellaz Cevarro. He had no doubt met many people on his travels with Cal and had affected them like he’d affected Ulaume. One day, Flick was sure, others would find them here. And by then Lileem might be adult. She was an enigma, and there was neither prurient nor morbidly curious intent on Flick’s part when he’d asked to see her body. He felt it was essential he should know and privately scorned Ulaume for not investigating the matter when Lileem had been younger. It showed, in his opinion, a lack of responsibility. Now, Lileem was shy about such things and not even Mima knew what secrets she hid beneath her clothes. Ulaume had only seen her naked when she was very little and said that although the ouana organs had appeared atrophied the soume-lam had seemed fairly normal, but how could they tell? None of them had seen a Wraeththu harling before. Lileem insisted she was more female than male, and Mima, perhaps for reasons of her own, tended to agree. Lileem wanted to be termed ‘she’, but this might only be because she knew she was different and not because it was a correct label for her difference.

As for Mima, Flick thought that being around hara had changed her. She was so like Pell, it was uncanny, and not just in physical appearance. There was a strangely familiar aura around her and when it touched Flick as they worked together, he felt there was another har beside him, not a human female. He was not drawn to her sexually. Instead, it inspired a kind of comfort within him. He felt he could trust her utterly and sometimes he was sure she could hear his unguarded thoughts. Occasionally, he would experiment by sending out a clear mind call, but to these Mima would never respond. Flick, however, could not dispel the impression this was deliberate and that she was concealing her abilities.

But these enigmas were put aside in the spring, when a new mystery presented itself to Flick. He had long accepted that the white house was a haunted place, and thought it no surprise, considering the many violent deaths that had taken place in the locale. He had often felt strange tinglings in his spine as he worked in the garden or walked though the settlement seeking tools and other supplies in the empty houses. Then, it came to Flick’s attention that Mima was taking food from their stores and disappearing into the settlement with it. He followed her on a couple of occasions, and found that she laid the food out behind the old Cevarro house. Eventually, he cornered her in the kitchen one morning and asked her outright what she was doing.

‘They are offerings,’ she said.

Flick was interested at once. ‘Offerings for spirits? Your family?’

Mima frowned. ‘Not exactly…’ She sighed deeply. ‘I feel awkward about this, but there’s no point keeping it secret, really. I have two dead brothers, Flick, but one still walks.’

And so the story of Terez came out. Flick’s initial reaction was of complete shock, not because a har had failed to complete an inception, but because Ulaume had done nothing about it. To Flick, this was typical Ulaume behaviour.

Mima came to Ulaume’s defence. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do. Terez is a walking corpse, but he can’t die. He won’t let me near him. He is terrified of those who live. Perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to kill him properly, but I can’t do it. I can’t. So I bring him food. Because of all that you’ve done, we live well now. I want Terez to share that, in whatever small way he can.’

‘You must take me to him,’ Flick said. ‘There must be something we can do.’

‘There isn’t,’ Mima said. ‘I’m responsible for what happened, Flick. I have to live with it.’

Flick thought about it for a while. ‘You acted out of ignorance, but not with malice. It’s not your fault. I think we could try to repeat the inception.’

Mima’s expression brightened. ‘We could do that? Is that possible?’

‘Ulaume should have thought of it before.’ Flick frowned. ‘But how? We lack the proper equipment. Blood has to be transfused.’

Mima stared at him steadily. He looked into her eyes and saw a small, fearful hope within them. She wet her lips with her tongue, swallowed. ‘Could we not… could we not
feed
him blood?’

Flick shook his head emphatically. ‘No, it doesn’t work that way.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ve seen hundreds of inceptions. We are not vampires, Mima.’

‘I think we should try it, all the same.’

Flick was alerted by a certain tone in her voice, and the fact that her aura seemed to condense around her like a protective blanket. ‘What makes you say this?’

‘Nothing, a hunch… What harm could it do?’

‘It’s more than that. I can sense it. Why won’t you tell me?’

Mima stood up and walked away from him. She went to the window by the sink, rubbed at a new pane of glass where some of Flick’s finger marks were still visible, close to the frame. ‘You might not approve of what you hear.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Tell me.’

She sighed. ‘I suggested it because it… because it was what happened to me.’

Flick stared at her for some seconds. ‘What?’

Mima turned to face him again. ‘Can’t you tell? I know you can. You’ve sensed it. I was waiting for you to ask.’

‘You have drunk Wraeththu blood?’ A dozen hideous images splashed across Flick’s mind.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘but not in the way you’re thinking. Before you came, but not long before, Lileem fell badly and was injured. I was… ill then, mentally ill. It was because of all that had happened, but… Anyway, when Lileem was hurt, I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how, so I licked her wound, like an animal would. I don’t know why I did it. I can’t remember what it was like to be me then. The blood affected me. I became… different. Not completely har, but different.’

‘Do you realise what you are saying?’

‘Not as much as you do, obviously.’

‘This is astounding. The implications are immense. Have you changed physically?’

‘Yes, and before you ask, I’ll not show you. Forget me. What I’m trying to say is…’

‘Forget you?’ Flick interrupted. ‘You can’t just skim over this, Mima. You don’t know how important this is. So many women have died during inception. As far as I know, no female has survived it. Hara should know about this. It should be investigated, studied…’

‘Be quiet!’ Mima snapped. ‘We are stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, and I have no intention of letting curious hara
investigate
me. If it’s happened to me, it’ll inevitably happen to someone else – if it’s meant to – and
they
can be investigated. Ulaume said my experience was probably an anomaly, a one off, and maybe it is, but the same process – of ingesting blood – might work for Terez. I should have thought of this before. It seems obvious now.’

Flick considered this, simultaneously attempting to accept the enormity of what she had told him. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyhar trying that. And the results might be unpredictable. You are not completely har, as you said yourself.’

Mima came back to the table, thumped it with a closed fist. ‘We must try. Look at me. I have my wits, my health and quite a bit more besides.’

Flick raised an eyebrow.

‘Strength, increased psychic ability and – yes – some puzzling physical adjustments. I don’t think we could use my blood though, or Lee’s, but yours or Ulaume’s might be suitable.’

Flick sighed, rubbed his face. ‘Mine then,’ he said wearily. ‘I predict Ulaume will not approve of your plan.’

Ulaume was indeed scathing of the idea. Later that day, while Mima took some blood from Flick’s arm in the kitchen, Ulaume stood with folded arms behind them, saying, ‘You are both mad. This won’t work. What happened to you, Mima, was a fluke.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Mima said.

‘At best it produces an incomplete inception,’ Ulaume insisted. ‘You are evidence of that. You are not har.’

‘But I’m not dead either,’ Mima snapped. ‘Aren’t women supposed to die?’

‘We don’t know anything,’ Flick said, wincing as Mima sliced into his arm with a sharp knife. ‘We have always accepted that women can’t be incepted. But now we are faced with new evidence, in you and Lileem. More things are possible than we know. I remembered something today. Don’t our own legends tell us the Aghama created the second Wraeththu by letting him feed upon his blood?’

‘Legends,’ Ulaume snapped. ‘Only that. Otherwise inception wouldn’t be what it is.’

‘Perhaps transfusion is a more effective and direct method,’ Flick said. ‘And Terez has already received one. What he lacked was the proper care during althaia and presumably the aruna that completes the process. If we could somehow awaken the harish parts of himself, the inception might progress as normal.’

‘Aruna with
that?’
Ulaume laughed cruelly. ‘Good luck, Flick. You haven’t seen what Terez has become.’

Mima took up the small bowl of Flick’s blood and soaked bread into it, adding herbs and chilli to make it more appetising. This, she carried to the shadowed corner behind her old home, where she habitually left food out for Terez. This time, Flick accompanied her. Usually, Mima would not hang around, because Terez would not appear if he sensed her near, but this night, she and Flick concealed themselves on a nearby roof to keep watch. Mima was still unsure Terez would make an appearance with them so close, even though they took care to shield their thoughts. Terez was damaged, but his senses were acute. They stayed out all night, huddled in blankets, and never heard a thing, but in the morning, they saw that the offering had been taken, and hopefully by Terez rather than a passing animal.