‘Emperor Urtica has made a request for you to return.’
‘Urtica?’ Vuldon enquired. ‘What happened to the Jamur girls?’
‘Don’t you read the news? They’ve long gone, tried to kill all the refugees. Urtica took over, arranged to have them executed but they managed to escape. Urtica’s in charge of the Empire and Villjamur.’
Vuldon didn’t seem too bothered that the Jamur lineage had cleared out of the city. Jamur blood sent a rage burning in his heart.
Thirty years ago… ‘So what does Urtica want of me exactly?’ Vuldon demanded. ‘Have you taken a good look at this place?’ He struck a match and fumbled around to light a lantern.
Vuldon gestured at himself: he was standing there wearing a gown and loose, ragged breeches. Everything in his house was as crippled as he was: strips of curtains, stained carpets, dishes he hadn’t washed in ages, piles of paper in one corner. Grey hairs on his once-muscular chest seemed to stand out as a sign of his age, so he covered himself up, suddenly aware of what he had been — a long time ago.
‘You stink,’ one of the agents said. ‘This whole fucking place stinks.’
‘Not exactly made much of myself these days. Told you, this isn’t like the stories. You were probably kids when you were hearing those for the first time.’
‘You could be someone again, Vuldon,’ the rumel said, a brown-skin, with more than a hint of optimism in his voice. ‘If you come with us, we’ll see to it that you’re treated well.’
‘Why me?’ Whatever answer they gave wouldn’t satisfy him: it wasn’t how these people worked. These agents would tell you only what could influence you — truth and lies, well, they never came into the picture.
‘Because you were the first one and the best, Vuldon,’ the rumel declared. ‘You were the Legend. You know how it all works, you know how to play this game. You understand criminals better than anyone else — hell, we’ve all heard tales, even in the Inquisition.’
‘That’s the problem — plenty of tales, not enough fact.’
‘You’ve got your old job waiting for you, in a new guise. We’re offering a chance to reinvent the Legend — all you need to do is come with us.’
As they spoke he glanced to the floor, walking his mind back in time. ‘I don’t care for that name any more. I’ve not thought about him in decades — just leave me alone.’
‘You’re lying,’ the rumel said. ‘I can hear it in your voice. Think on — Legend. We’ll be back tomorrow evening.’
Vuldon eventually looked up but they’d gone and left the door open. The family next door were starting to surface, their kids screaming the place down. A cat trotted by in the corridor, looking in tentatively, nosing the air, then moved on, thinking better of it. Vuldon peered around his room at his meagre possessions: decrepit furniture, a few old books, a stack of blank parchment, empty bottles of alcohol and ink, unwashed plates.
Brushing his thick stubble, Vuldon chuckled. Not even an animal will venture in here.
He felt too jaded to close the door, but eventually he forced himself to do so.
With a groan he took the lantern and shuffled slowly to his bedroom, but pausing by a cupboard. A minute passed, maybe two, as he contemplated what was beyond.
When he finally nudged it open a bar of light fell across some of his old clothes — the ones from way back. Dust motes filled the air. His fingers walked across some of those items, across some of his memories. There it was, his old uniform, the one he wore when he was someone else, but he didn’t want to get it out just yet.
No, he wasn’t ready for any of that, and shut the door, and headed to his bedroom.
As he lay in bed that night, his own history came back to provoke his dreams.
EIGHT
Lan awoke in a cell, her body thronging in agony. The brick walls around her drifted in and out of focus. More than once she was forced to lie sideways on the mattress to relieve the pain, her hands bound behind her, rope around her torso, only to stare at the ceiling, her head aching as if she was on the bad end of a riotously good night’s drinking.
Everything since her return from Ysla had merged into a sequence of disconnected images. Had the cultists done something to her head and messed with her memories?
No, they had not, and the realization came back to her like an echo.
*
The cultists had taken care to provide her with forged documents to allow her back into Villjamur, as a woman, and without any attention being drawn to her history.
As she rode up to the main gates of Villjamur, guided only so far by the cultist associate on horseback, she had been mortified to witness the tent-city outside, where refugees had massed. A humanitarian disaster spread for half a mile along the main road into Villjamur, a settlement of tin shacks and canvas houses and small pit fires that leaked paltry trails of smoke. Grubby and layered in rags, people bore expressionless faces, yet eyed her closely as she rode through their mass. Now and then she spotted people clothed in fine Jorsalir robes, handing out flatbreads. It was a haunting trek up to the gates.
After passing through the high levels of security at the gates of the city, a task made effortless due to the fine faked documents produced by Cayce, there was a small administrative matter to attend to, where she had to collect her key from one of the sub-Council posts annexed to the Villjamur Inquisition, which merely required a number to be recited and money would be handed over.
Is it really that easy to be reborn in Villjamur?
She eventually strode back to her family’s old home, a large two-up, two-down on the fourth level of the city.
Nostalgia washed over her as the lanes and crumpled granite facades ignited her memories. When she stood inside for the first time, smelling the musk of her dead parents, she immediately began the process of shredding all traces of her former existence — letters and deeds and heirlooms. The Caine family name was assiduously eradicated from Villjamur. Despite the fact that she had been left the property, despite clear evidence that her parents must still have possessed some love for her, for her own sanity she needed to purge the past. Like herself, she would have the house transformed. She had suspected that many of the rooms would hold bad memories for her, but she was relieved to discover that she had blocked much of her childhood from her mind. Memories were unreliable at the best of time, but over the years she had accepted what her parents felt towards her, accepted their hatred of who and what she was. As she let them go for the last time, she felt relief. Lan repeated to herself that people only ever feared and loathed anything that was different. Her transformation was nearing completion.
*
Lan had been in Villjamur for twenty days since her operation on Ysla, and her body still hadn’t fully recovered from the procedures. Bruises had formed in surprising places, and she discovered internal aches in previously unknown regions. Just underneath her ribs, a small, knife-thin wound was noticeable, but aside from that there was very little in the way of actual scarring. She felt moments of acute weakness and dizzy spells and occasional nausea but, over time, they too diminished. By the twentieth day of her return, she was feeling well again.
Ever so slowly, she was learning what it was like to be a woman in Villjamur. It was years since she had lived in the city, and there was a lot to get used to.
Lan was now fully — anatomically — a woman. She possessed the same rights as a woman, and she would be treated by others like a woman. But the city, it seemed, was not constructed for the benefit of womankind. Doors were opened, quite literally, and that was rather lovely at first, but she became ultra-sensitive to further gestures from men. She did not feel especially pretty, but could feel their gazes. Looks from others were penetrating and loaded with new psychology, and other women seemed to judge her out-of-touch fashions. Whenever she spoke up in the iren, the traders would patronize her. She sought employment — she had enough money for the short term, but wanted to be out doing something, engaging with the world, and with enough wealth to live well. She wandered from street to street, up and down the levels for several days, exploring what work was available.