- City of
- FLOREY
Atendere 28, 01:37
Near the House of Hugo Piatella
Against the violet-black night sky, the buildings swayed and reeled. Decazzi willed them to stop, but it was no use. The stars wouldn't stay still either. In his haze, he couldn't keep his feet. He caught himself in the recessed doorway of a shop, banging into the door's glass pane. The noise caused his heart to race.
If the Florey guards caught him out this late...
A white-washer like him? They'd beat him. Maybe lock him up for the night. It would be different if he were a fine gentlemen. Light above, it would be different if he merely worked in one of these shops! But he didn't. This was the path that Agnos shown for him. Decazzi wished that the path led to another bar.
Decazzi jammed his hands into his pockets to hide the soft yellow glow of his palms. He didn't need to attract any attention.
He needed to get home.
His wife wouldn't have waited for him. She never did.
Unfortunately, the buildings, the stars, and the pavement were very active, and Decazzi's feet were not. Kurtz had let him try something new tonight, for free, after Decazzi had bought a few ounces of wing dust. It was some sort of squid juice, cold and black. The drug had cracked his mind wide open, freeing him! At least for a few minutes.
Now, he was chilled and clumsy and felt like he was at the bottom of the sea. His hands and feet were numb, and his palms were the color of dry straw.
Ponderously, he shifted his weight from one foot to the next and managed a step.
A noise, not quite the echo of the loose windowpane, issued from around the corner. The crash, the sort of thing that guaranteed trouble, was directly in Decazzi's path home. He didn't have the wits to contemplate a detour. He lurched around the edge of the building and, amazingly, stayed upright.
Decazzi expected to find thugs in the midst of breaking into a shop or perhaps the city guard roughing up those thugs. Whatever the case, Decazzi was determined to keep his eyes averted and move through as fast as his legs could manage.
He could not have expected what he found.
Orange light wavered in the windows above one of the shops. For a moment, Decazzi imagined that light was from a reddish lamp, with the shadow of someone moving in front of it. Perhaps, a beautiful woman, naked, providing late night entertainment for her gentleman.
A second crash surprised him, and he stumbled to the center of the adjoining square. The light flared brighter and was accompanied by a roar. Decazzi struggled to think if he'd ever experienced anything like this before, anything as wild and feral. It elicited a strange feeling of fear. But why should it? The color, a rich orange-yellow, wasn't queer or unnatural. It was the color of Agnos.
And Decazzi then knew why the light made him feel sick to his stomach. This was the color of Purity. The color of a Cleansing.
Decazzi attended his first Cleansing when he was eight years old. At first, he'd thought his mother was taking him to a fair. The gathering had seemed like that, with so many people, and Decazzi had wondered why his mother would do such a thing. Just a few days before he had gotten in trouble for stealing during a shopping excursion. The day of that Cleansing had not ended with enjoyment, but with a lesson. As the criminal atop the spire became blackened by Agnos' light, his mother had spoken to him as she never had in the past. Her voice had been flat and serious as if she were speaking to a fellow adult.
"That's what happens to every man that strays too far from the path that Agnos has illuminated for him."
Decazzi heard another crash and a wordless noise that might have been a scream. That sound was swallowed by what could have been a rush of wind. The light of Agnos was in all the windows, staring down accusingly at Decazzi.
This wasn't the first time that a man had been Cleansed without the Ecclesians, though Decazzi hadn't really believed the other stories to be true.
He made the sign of Agnos' eye in the bright night before him.
"Please," he whispered. "Don't purify me tonight."
He could see Agnos' light, dancing and bright in the downstairs widows of the shop too. Thick, oily vapors seeped from cracks around the window.
"Please." He knew he should leave, run. Agnos' Cleansing brightness was at the door of the shop. The sound was deafening. That bright heat would soon spill out into the square and show Decazzi how far labdanum and wing dust and Kurtz' forsaken squid juice had led him astray.
From out of the skipping and shimmying light, a figure lurched and fell against the glass door. Its hand scrabbled for the door latch.
Decazzi's eyes widened. Empyreal radiance clung to what had been clothes and hair. The door would be locked, surely. Not easily opened.
Decazzi made the sign again. He willed his legs to move back, but they wouldn't obey.
The door gave way and the figure stumbled forward.
Decazzi let out a cry. Before the sound passed his lips, the touch of Agnos was gone from the figure, leaving behind blackened flesh. The thing that lay three feet from Decazzi had once been a woman.
