The Fellowship

Alana spent the rest of the morning trying to calm herself.

The news of Arcius’s arrest kept circling in her head. The eclipse still persisted, even with the line of penitents surrounding the church. Apparently, word had spread through the region that an inquisitor had traveled to Lys, and inhabitants of other villages had come to the small town hoping to return light to the skies by confessing their sins before the Nine.

The commotion ended up being good for her, since the constant flow of people arriving to camp around the church left Inquisitor Rusuma unexpectedly busy. Alana could well imagine that the bastard had not expected that when he said, in front of the faithful, all that nonsense about the gods stealing the light from the sky because of Arcius’s sin.

Serves him right.

At noon, she closed the office and ignored three notes stuck to the doorframe. It wasn’t as if the detective had no clients, even in that backwater, but she could already imagine the sort of superstition people would want investigated with everything that was happening that day.

No point asking me to find the Eye of Ereth, idiots! I know very well where it is…

Under the dull glow of the public lights, she walked to her favorite tavern, crossing streets filled with a shadowed unease since the last toll of the bell, yet empty of a single living soul. The overwhelming majority had been led by the Praefectus to the temple to beg mercy before the Nine.

I suppose only drunks and vagrants are still wandering around, and I fit a little in both categories.

Alana sat at the counter, let out a dry laugh, still immersed in self-deprecating thoughts. She ordered a local spirit and downed it in one go.

She ordered another.

“Are you all right, Alana?” asked Comenius, the owner. “You don’t need to overdo it. Even though the day isn’t normal, I doubt the world’s going to end just because an inquisitor came here to spout a load of crap.”

At first, she didn’t answer, considering what she would say to the tavern-keeper. Comenius was an honest man despite the sorts he welcomed in his establishment. And a good drinking companion.

Not knowing what to say, she simply nodded. When the third glass arrived, the alcohol rose quickly. A mild dizziness came, followed by the empty feeling of calm, and finally a rage that found no room inside her.

“One more!” she asked, her voice thick.

Comenius sighed and shook his head no, but poured the measure. He was a good friend, but above all a merchant and already used to the legendary blunders of the drunk detective in his establishment.

At least he never let it go too far. Once, Alana had threatened a sensual dance on one of the tables in the middle of the hall. The good tavern-keeper held her back and, with immense courtesy, escorted his inebriated customer back home, safe and sound.

“No day is” Alana muttered, more to herself. “No damned day is normal!”

She staggered out shortly after four in the afternoon — not that it mattered on a day as dark as that — cloak fastened and hood low. The shadow of the church tower cut across the long street. It was the first time she noticed how close the tavern and the temple stood.

Perhaps this is mankind’s fate: unwittingly a step from salvation, yet choosing to ignore it to drown in the misery of one’s own vices.

Alana crossed the bridge over the canal that ran through the village and took the road to her mother’s house. She had decided to postpone the trip to Castra Devana for one more day and, suddenly before leaving, decided she needed to see her.

Perhaps to hear a scolding. Or simply to see the only person, besides Arcius, who seemed truly real in her world.

Before, the two of them had seemed immutable, unchanged no matter how time passed, and now this… my old friend imprisoned! Should I expect some surprise from my mother too?!

The Kassler family residence was a two-story mansion, built in solid masonry with a façade coated in stucco and red ceramic roof tiles. The main entrance had double doors of dark wood, reinforced in bronze, flanked by two straight columns supporting a balcony on the second floor.

The ground-floor windows were tall, framed by stone arches, with wrought-iron grilles and thick panes, while those on the upper floor had narrow balconies with worked-iron parapets.

The heavy door leading to an inner vestibule with a geometric mosaic floor, connected to a central atrium lit by a square skylight, was ajar. Beyond lay the atrium, and around its corridors gave access to the main rooms on the first floor: a triclinium with a long solid-wood table, upholstered chairs, and walls paneled with paintings on historical themes; a kitchen with a stone oven, marble countertop, and shelves filled with copper pots; and a sitting room with bookcases, high-backed chairs, and colorful tapestries hanging.

From the sitting room came voices and shrill laughter with a slight tone of argument. She recognized them at once.

My uncles!

Her heart sped for a moment and the early hangover churned her stomach.

They were not in fact siblings of her father or mother, but old friends of Alana’s father from the time he had worked for a dubious employer in Castra Devana. Back then, her family had not lived in the mansion, but when Alana’s father suddenly returned from the capital, he had enough money to guarantee them a comfortable life in that opulent house and spend the rest of his days as a moderately successful fiction writer around the Empire.

Since then, those three men and one woman came every year, more or less at the same time. They called themselves “The Fellowship” and had not ceased their visits even after the detective’s father passed away. It was as if they truly were her relatives and, as in any family, she liked some more than others.

The sitting-room door was propped with a chair, and inside, her mother and the uncles drank from low glasses. On the table stood a bottle of wine, a pitcher of water, two cups with cold tea, and a forgotten pot. The smell of freshly baked bread came from the kitchen, leaving a trail of a delicious aroma that was almost tangible.

“I’ve been studying the signs and I say with absolute certainty” said Uncle Oppius, face red, rocking his bulk on the chair in which he reclined to the point his double chin looked about to collapse onto itself amid the mountain of flabby fat he had become after years of a bourgeois life in the Academic District of the Middle Ring of the Grand-Devana. “This eclipse is not normal! And the disappearance of the relic… it’s all obviously connected. The Orthodoxy has even chosen a culprit already, but those who, like me, have attended the sermons of the Pontifex Maximus at the Celestial Sanctuary know they’re trying to hide something.”

“The priest” Aunt Mila murmured, sulking as Uncle Naeuso stopped her from stretching for a glass of wine. “I heard they’re already taking him to the capital… stop it, man! Let me drink!”

“You’re far too young, my friend” laughed Naeuso, keeping his usual cheerfulness in his eyes even with all that white hair, which now made him look like a sheep ready to be shorn. “Old Kassler wouldn’t like it.”

Mila glared at him. That was an inside joke of the group. As the only woman, she was also the youngest member of the Fellowship, and the others treated her like a child to rile her. Even though she was nearly sixty.

Alana almost ignored them to sneak to the stairs up to the bedrooms on the second floor and slip past the uncles she did not wish to speak to. But Oppius’s words made her remain in the corridor, surprised by the topic the five of them — counting her mother — had set for discussion.

“And the music box?” asked Uncle Servus, the one Alana liked least. He was a magistrate in the legal corps of one of the great cities of the east, prone to pompous speech and to treating Alana as a silly little child, even speaking to her in the diminutive. “Is it in the attic? What was it called again?”

“‘The Song of Alana’” answered Aruna, Alana’s mother, sipping distractedly at a mouthful of cold tea. “It’s broken, the way you remember it. Why the memory now…? Alana?!”

Her mother finally noticed her outside. Unconsciously, she had drawn closer to hear what the confrères were saying.

Damn it!

“Come in, girl!” her mother exclaimed, joy and worry at once in her voice. “Don’t tell me you came on foot with that face.”

Alana took off her hood, straightened her cloak, and stepped in, slowly. She kissed her mother’s cheek — her hands still smelled of flour — and greeted her uncles with a nod.

All four raised half a glass to her, a greeting a bit too solemn for the occasion. But the Fellowship had its quirks.

“You arrived too early, my daughter. I was going to visit you later. Sit! Do you want tea? Or water?”

“Water” Alana replied, feeling a strong headache, though deep down she felt she needed something stronger.

As the saying goes: avoid the hangover, stay drunk!

She sat in a chair near the window and her mother served water. Then remained standing, hands on hips, and studied her daughter.

“You’ve been drinking” Aruna concluded, but without judgment in her voice.

“A little. I… needed it.”

“‘Needed it,’ she says” Oppius grumbled, but with a note of concern and affection in his voice. “You’ve always needed hard things, girl.”

“Don’t talk like that about our little girl, Oppius” Servus asked, giving Alana a condescending smile that almost made her retch.

“Your father would be proud, in any case” Naeuso added. “We raised a toast to him just now.”

They fell briefly silent.

Aunt Mila then pulled a tarot deck from her little bag, as if she had been waiting for any pretext to do so.

“I was waiting for you, dear. Let me read your fortune.”

“Aunt…” Alana tried to plead, weary. “Not today. Please!”

“It’s quick” Mila promised, already shuffling. “Just three cards.”

Alana didn’t argue, and her mother shrugged with a smile that asked for patience. The young detective then fell silent, partly because Oppius and Servus turned up their noses.

“Cut” her aunt asked.

Alana cut the deck and Aunt Mila turned the first card: The Tower.

“Good!” she murmured, excited. “Rupture. Something falls to make room for something else. And it falls abruptly!”

“It’s already started, woman” Oppius said dryly. “Aruna told us the priest was her friend. Or have you forgotten? The poor girl must have even gotten drunk because of his arrest.”

“Don’t interrupt me, you drooling old man!” Mila shot back, irritated. “Second card.”

She turned it: The Hanged Man. Servus didn’t like it and made the sacred sign of the Weaver of the End.

“Forced pause. Sacrifice. A choice that is no choice at all” she interpreted, her voice dropping.

“This is sounding delightful” Alana said, humorless.

“Third” Mila turned it slowly.

The Devil. The atmosphere seemed to weigh, but that was only an impression. Alana’s mother lowered her eyes, and Uncle Naeuso let out a short whistle.

“Chains” Mila explained softly. “Vices. Prisons: of the body, of the heart, of the past. You know what I’m talking about?”

“No, I don’t!” Alana replied, irritated, taking her eyes off the cards. “Thank you, Aunt. But it’s only paper. Life walks on the legs it has.”

“Well said, girl” Oppius seemed pleased, which annoyed her twice over.

Aunt Mila gathered the cards, visibly unsettled, as if she wanted to redo the spread. Her mother took her hand, and that was the end of it. Servus sighed in relief, thanking the gods for the end of that “pagan ritual.”

“I’m going to the capital tomorrow morning” Alana informed them. “It’s work, and I may be gone for a few days. I don’t know how many.”

“Castra Devana? Right in election season?!” Oppius’s eyebrows arched; he glanced discreetly at the others, who nodded, and Alana noticed the odd complicity. “Stay at my house, it’s near the Imperial University. It’ll spare you bad inns and even worse food.”

“Thanks, Uncle, but no” she answered firmly. “It’s better if I use a boarding house. As I said, I have no set schedule, and the last thing I want is to inconvenience any of you.”

“As you prefer.”

“Before I go, though, I wanted to pick up a few personal items still in my room” she went on, finally drinking the water. “May I, Mother?”

Aruna nodded.

“Of course, dear. Go up and rest here tonight. Just don’t mess with the sewing boxes I spread in the corridor. Your Uncle Naeuso nearly tripped on my fabrics earlier.”

“I’ll go carefully.”

Alana stood… and the world swayed lightly, but her body was used to the daily inebriation.

She climbed the stairs to the upper floor and saw that her parents’ bedroom door was ajar. And there was Mr. Kassler, watching her from a portrait on the dresser.

She stepped in only to touch the frame of the portrait. Her father seated with a fishing pole by the stream that ran through Lys, hat askew and a modest smile. Alana pressed her lips together, took a breath, and left.

She headed discreetly to the attic hatch in the corridor ceiling. She pulled the entry down carefully and lowered the ladder with a creak of wood that still lived in childhood memories.

The attic had always been the same. Clearly labeled boxes covered with ghost-white sheets, old trunks thick with dust, and bolts of fabric rolled for sewing. The music box was in its usual place, on a chest, under a cloth. “‘The Song of Alana’” engraved on a copper plate, had been screwed to the lid.

The mechanism broken since forever.

She picked up the box in both hands and noticed it weighed more than she remembered. A foolish object her father had promised to fix.

“Found you!” she said to herself. “I don’t know why one of them asked about you down there, but I’m taking you with me before they make you disappear.”

She tucked the box inside her cloak, next to the Eye of Ereth, and went back down, feeling a strange resonance between the two objects. Just in her head, obviously. She descended the ladder carefully, pushed the hatch back up until it clicked, and brushed the dust off her shoulder.

“So?” Uncle Servus’s voice startled her. “Did you get what you needed?”

“I did!” Alana answered without showing anything, one hand over her chest. Her heart was racing. “Just… my things.”

“ Like‘The Song of Alana’, perhaps?” the uncle ventured, peering at her with narrowed eyes.

She held his gaze and did not answer.

“Listen well to what I’m going to say now, girl” he began, in a tone that in no way resembled his usual pedantic eloquence. “Don’t hand it to anyone! Some of the fools down there don’t want you involved in this, but I think differently. I know you think I treat you like a child, but know it was my way of protecting you until the hour came.”

“Hour, Uncle? What hour?” Alana pressed him, a step closer to that elderly man who was only a little shorter than she.

“There’s no time for explanations, child. You’re a detective; I know you’ll discover everything. Juncuso wouldn’t let me say more. Not after the recent massacre of our allies. We can’t trust anyone, and that’s why we’re here! The only trustworthy people are in that room downstairs, and I’m betraying them, but you needed warning. Just… don’t give that box to anyone. Or at least to no one who isn’t from the Convergence.”

The same name Arcius told me yesterday!

“Servus, what’s going on up there?” Oppius’s voice came from the base of the stairs, still on the lower floor. “Stop bothering the girl, you old zealot!”

“I’m only advising our little girl not to take the valley road” Uncle Servus shouted back. “The army has set a blockade because of the trade route, at the orders of that damned Senator Prebito. If I were her I’d go by Onórion and take a boat to the Grand-Devana.”

“No need to shout, you deaf old man! Especially while insulting an imperial senator like that for no reason.”

“Oh, you scoundrel!” Servus winked at Alana and headed for the stairs. “I’ll talk politics however I please in old Kassler’s house! And furthermore, I’m a civil magistrate of the Empire! I have my place to speak…”

As he went down, her mother came up with a tired look.

“Don’t make me lose sleep for nothing, Alana” Aruna said with a half smile. “I know Arcius is your best friend and he’s being taken to the imperial city, but don’t do anything foolish, daughter. For the love of the Nine!”

“I’m not going there to find him, Mother.” Though part of the work involves proving his innocence! “The Inquisition took Arcius, and I wouldn’t have the power to persuade them even if I befriended the First Citizen while I’m there. You know how stubborn the priests are.”

“I’m only asking for caution” her mother replied, sweetness in her voice. “Just caution. And your Aunt Mila asked you to take this: your card. I know you don’t believe, but take it. She’ll feel grateful.”

“What is my card?”

“Justice!” It was Mila’s turn to shout from downstairs. “It isn’t vengeance, dear. It’s weight and counterweight. Sometimes it’s a sword. Sometimes it’s forgiveness. You know better than I.”

Alana gave a half smile.

“Thank you, Aunt.”

“And if you change your mind about lodging in Castra Devana…” Uncle Oppius called out, insisting one last time. “My door is always open. And… I have friends at the University. If you need help.”

“I’d rather no one else get involved” Alana replied. “It’s my job, Uncle. I can handle it.”

“All right,” Oppius agreed in a small, disappointed yet proud voice, finally falling silent downstairs.

Uncle Naeuso, however, came up the stairs.

“The Orthodoxy will go door to door” he warned. “We won’t let anyone in here without an order signed by the inquisitor, and even then Servus will challenge him. Nothing bad will happen to your mother. Avoid dealing with them much until you’re far from here as well. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Uncle. I can and I will!”

At last Alana managed to dismiss them and locked herself in her room.

She took off her cloak, sat on the bed, set the music box on one side of her lap and the Eye of Ereth on the other. She ran her thumb over the copper plate with the name “Song of Alana” and also over the case of the sacred relic.

She tested the key to wind the mechanism. The music began with irregular, distorted sounds. The notes that should have sounded like a children’s melody came in fits and starts, too slow at times and too fast at others, as if the mechanism were stuck in an off-kilter cadence.

The metallic timbre recalled bells tolled underwater, and certain chords seemed to form dissonant intervals too close for the ear to accept as harmony. Between the mechanical pauses, low noises surfaced, almost whispers, created by the friction of worn gears — sounds that shouldn’t have been there, yet seemed to mimic distant voices.

Horrified, Alana shoved the box back into her cloak lining, this time deeper, next to her skin. She went to the basin and splashed water on her face. The reflection in the mirror no longer looked as careless a drunk as before.

The dizziness had passed, leaving behind an irritable clarity. She also felt a strange pressure in her head, as if the music still echoed behind her eyes, making room for a growing, nameless unease.

In the inner pocket, her fingers touched the small leather case that held the Eye of Ereth. She pushed it deeper too, by instinct, and breathed through her nose.

Sleep came in fits and starts and, when it finally arrived, it was shallow and filled with the voices of the day: first Arcius’s name echoing in the church nave beneath the inquisitor’s golden mask, then Aunt Mila turning cards, and at last Uncle Servus’s warning.

In the morning, she would leave for Castra Devana. With her father’s music box and the church’s secret.

And, for now, the weight of those secrets was all she could carry.