Revolving Door: Volume 2
Forged in Fire - I
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts deadly infectious diseases.
As Marcia’s eyes come to rest on the wound, dread rakes down her back. Now she starts to feel it: a gnawing at her flesh, a smouldering decay. It is different from any other she has known. Different from the sickness on lions’ teeth. She is a sack of skin enclosing muscle and bones, so vulnerable to rot.
“No,” she breathes, vision drifting away from her body.
At that gentle utterance, Vesper tugs on her wrist. Both pairs of feet stop on the grass, and Marcia’s startled eyes rise to meet hers—there is enough force there to hold her fast to the ground.
Her companion murmurs something in that rolling tongue of hers; the fear straining her voice and the wrinkling of her brow are the only things Marcia can understand. Then she lets go, and swings the pack off her shoulder. She kneels in the grass, pulling a large metal flask and a bandage from the pockets.
Marcia can barely look as Vesper steadies her leg with a hand behind her knee. She grips the end of the bandage between her teeth and pours water from the flask, coolness trickling over the tear in her skin. The wound lights up with sensation, and so does her face.
“Please,” she gasps, vision throbbing again. “This is too much.” Vesper doesn't seem to understand, unbuckling Marcia’s sandal and wrapping the bandage once, twice, around her shin.
By now, the rest have halted several arms’ lengths away. “Hurry already!” Orobelle shouts. “We're two worlds away from where we should be!”
Rising back to her feet, Vesper nods to Marcia. Her next words are gentle, and afraid, spoken as much by her eyes as her voice. With a nod at each other, they hasten to rejoin the party.
On the first grey road of the city, Vesper and Hong Yi fall into a murmured conversation. Marcia watches as he reaches into a pocket of his trousers and pulls out a small rectangular slab of glass and metal, tapping on its surface so that it lights up. Colours fleet across the glowing surface, and he continues tapping for a while, looking away from the road.
Then, slowing to her side, he says over his shoulder, in stilted syllables, “Hoc vulnus te occidere.” This wound will kill you.
Marcia’s eyes widen. “You know Latin?” He looks like someone from the other end of the continent where Constantinople sits, from Mongolia or Sina, but he dresses nothing like what she hears they do, wearing a metal-framed eyepiece on his nose.
Instead of replying, he turns the gleaming tablet around to show it to her.
On the luminescent glass are printed two blocks of words—one labelled “Latin,” the other, “English.” And there, written in the light, are the words he has just spoken, inscribed in majuscule.
She watches, eyes round, as he wipes the glass clear of text, then begins to tap out a new message on a mosaic of white lettered tiles.
She reads the words before he voices them: “This tool translates both ways. You may use it.” He taps on the glass again, and the two blocks of text switch places.
Marcia takes the device, warm from his touch, and scans the letters for the ones she knows, the ones she doesn't. She starts to tap out her reply, glancing now and then at the words that have appeared on the other side. There are some letters she does not recognise, and some joined together in ways she hasn't seen…
“T-hat is not c—” She starts reading, but stumbles on the syllables. She wrinkles her brow, frowns and hands the device back, but Hong Yi yells with delight, glancing between the screen and her face. He says something in a rush of syllables, waves at the screen, and reads out her words. “That is not certain.”
Leaning, she studies the letters again. “Th” makes a sound like “f.” She echoes him: that is not certain. He grins for seconds, and then his expression sobers. Clearing her words, he starts tapping out more.
“You have abilities relating to healing?” he reads aloud in Latin. She nods. He types. “But this disease has a hundred-in-hundred mortality rate, without a physician.”
“I know.” He doesn't seem to need a translation.
She waves for his device, and he hands it over. With Hong Yi watching over her shoulder, she begins to print her reply, sigil by sigil. She makes a mistake. He points out the tile with the shape like a triangle attached to a square.
Then, one painstaking minute later, she shows him the words. “It will not be easy, but I have faith. I have survived many things that should have killed me.”
As they cross a road and step onto its grey paved verge, Vesper returns to Marcia’s side—this time with the long-haired man following her. Brown-skinned and brown-haired, he stands tall despite leaning with the weight of Honourless on his shoulder, orange silk coat swishing around his feet. He has a distant look in his eye that resolves to attention when Vesper speaks to him.
Turning to Marcia, he says, “I do not think we have properly met.” It's perfectly comprehensible Latin. “My name is Dorian the Hopeful—I am Orobelle’s protector. Vesper would like me to ask, on her behalf, how you are feeling.”
“Ah! Dorian, what a relief to hear words I understand,” she says. As they walk, the mountain wind whips past, biting through gaps in her armour. She draws her arms around herself. How does she feel? “I don’t know. I’m startled, terrified…confused.”
He relays the words, again in Latin—and her eyes widen when Vesper answers, as if comprehending him. Marcia watches her form foreign words with her mouth.
“She asks if you are sure you can survive,” Dorian says. “Hong Yi claims you are able to heal yourself, but there are physicians—in this world, at least—who would know how to treat such an affliction, too.”
As he speaks, Marcia begins to notice a tremble in her arms, the cold raising goosebumps all along them. The gnawing in her leg has grown insistent; it turns her stomach. “I know that my survival without intervention is possible,” she says, “but that is all I can say for sure.”
As he repeats her words to Vesper, it dawns on her: there is magic at work here. Everyone must be hearing him in their own tongue.
“She says, ‘I'm sorry it has been so sudden, that you were taken without warning…’”
“No, I am happy to be gone, at least now,” Marcia replies. “I had few friends there, and many enemies. There was a woman I fancied, but she was a slave, and there was a prince too entangled in political plots…I do not know if either will survive the reckoning to come.” She exhales slowly.
“‘That sounds frightening, all the same.’”
“It is less frightening than it is disorienting. And now, I am at death’s door. Dorian—I have some questions of my own.”
Blinking, he gestures his agreement. “I shall answer as I am able.”
“Who are you?” she says. “You and everyone in this gathering. Where do you come from?”
“That is a long story. We have come a long way in search of you. Each of us hails from a different world, except myself and Orobelle.”
Marcia blinks. “What do you mean by a different world? How can there be another world?” She thinks again of the way the world flashed by, of the alien structures in the distance. “Is this…”
He nods. “These worlds lie parallel to each other, side by side, but we can only transit between them through special means, like Tunnels, and ghosts like Honourless.” He nods at the woman over his shoulder. “My duchess and I, we have crossed five worlds to find you. You are like the rest of us. You wield influence over some innate force of the world. And my duchess, Orobelle, holds these worlds together—she is the one who sought us out.”
For a minute, Marcia stares, as a hundred mysteries coalesce into one. The kindness she drew from strangers. Her ability to placate with touch…her sensing of the internal state of every body. He must be referring to that; there is no other meaning to his words.
Her eyes dart from one person to another—Orobelle, whose small form belies a world of unspoken trouble, Hong Yi with his questioning eyes, and Vesper—who is watching her with such intensity that she has to look away.
“What magic do you possess?”
“The giving and taking of heat,” Dorian answers, after some thought. “I light campfires…I cool water for drinking.”
“A pantheon of gods, that is what we are,” she murmurs. “Is Orobelle only here to unite us? Is there other business, for which you should come so far to find me?”
“We are saving my niece’s life,” he says.
“Ah…and what do I have to do with that?”
“She was taken by someone—someone who destroyed the town Orobelle presides over. You would be crucial—or so I've been told—in our confrontation against them.”
“I see. I have wondered, how is it that everyone hears you in their own tongue?”
“Oh, that…that is a boon from my servitude to my duchess. I did not always have this skill.”
Marcia waits for the next sentence, but it does not come. She nods slowly, mulling over this barest hint of a new picture of the cosmos. The city of Constantinople, which was her world for years, is suddenly tiny and far away. There is a lot to this man, much of which he’s not saying—and she has a feeling she may never hear of it, if the duchess has her way…
“Well…could you ask Vesper this, then—does she know Latin? She spoke a few words of it to me before. She even has a name like a Latin one.”
This question, Dorian echoes immediately for Vesper, who seemed almost to be waiting to answer. When she replies, he translates: “She doesn't know Latin. But she knows a language descended from Latin, which shares similar words.”
“Descended? She’s…from the future?”
“It is not the future, nor the past,” he says solemnly. “Each world has its own place in the flow of time. For those living in a given world, that is their present.” As he concludes, Vesper speaks up again, gesturing for a translation. “She says, ‘I have only seen swords like yours in museums. Latin is no longer spoken where I’m from. It is lucky we share some words in common… By the way, I was impressed at your poise and level head during the fight.’”
From nowhere, a jolt of thrill spears through Marcia’s dread. She musters up a cool smile. “Why, that means a lot coming from you, my dashing saviour.”
When Dorian translates for Vesper, her eyebrows rise in perplexion at first, then her face eases into a smile of her own as she answers. “‘I did only what the situation demanded. If you had been any slower to act, there would have been none of you left to save.’”
Marcia lets herself bask in the compliment for just a second, before the gravity of her predicament sets back in. “Well, let's hope there is still some of me left by next week,” she replies, and they walk on.
At last, they enter the city, frigid in the afternoon sun. Concrete blocks pepper the roadsides among evergreen gardens, tall and grey, with few concessions to fountains and glass. Cyrillic characters declare the names of places, but Hong Yi can only read them by sound—enough to understand they are in a city called Arkalyk. Everything else, he will have to Google later.
They soon come upon a surly hotel on the second street down, the only one to announce itself with block letters in English. Orobelle lowers her translation glass and waves them in its direction, and like a pack of dogs they follow her towards it.
“Honourless,” she declares as they march up the plaza to the lobby. “Honourless!” She groans. “Hong Yi. What currency do we need?”
Stopping outside the steel-framed doors, she waves for her bag. Dorian tugs one out from under Honourless’ limp form, and begins to produce a variety of bills out of the pockets. Hong Yi stares as the man conjures an unsorted wad of United States dollars and Nigerian naira.
“Erm…none of these,” he murmurs. “I’m gonna have to take this to a money changer.”
“Well, don’t be long.” She nods once at Dorian, who extends the handful of bills towards him. With a befuddled blink, he snatches the stack of money, and bursts into the hotel lobby.
The woman on staff comprehends his English, but only just; with a tidy smile, she recites the directions—one street down and turn the corner. With a hasty thanks, he zips out the doors and past his entourage on the doorstep, shoving the bills deep into his pockets.
If the wrinkled man at the rickety money exchange speaks English, he does not find out—currency is the only language he needs this time. The teller takes the proffered money with knobbly fingers with practised ease, and hands back an amount of tenge roughly equal to what he has calculated from the rate on his wall.
When Hong Yi returns, Orobelle and company have relocated to the rustic couches inside the lobby. It seems Dorian has lain Honourless down on the cushions, and Marcia sits by her knees, with Vesper leaning against the wall beside them.
Upon the first sight of his face, Orobelle marches up to him, hand outstretched, to which he yields the tenge. He was not expecting a thank-you. There isn't one.
This time, the duchess allows Dorian to make the bookings, although from the vantage of the couch, it appears from all her gesticulation that she is dictating every word to him.
They watch in restless silence. Honourless starts to slip off the couch. Hong Yi quickly nudges her torso back onto the seat with his knee. “What a slave driver,” Vesper mutters, eyes trained on the girl. “I hope Dorian is getting paid for his efforts.”
“In liquid food, maybe.”
It is Orobelle who returns with the stack of keys in her hand, Dorian tailing her silently. “Attention, everyone!” she calls—three heads turn. Dorian lifts the fourth off the couch. “Here are the keys to your lodging. I will have a room to myself. Dorian will be with me. The rest of you may share the family suite in whatever distribution you please.”
They only spare a second to glance between themselves, and at the woman now propped up against Dorian's shoulder. “Sure…we can be family for a couple of days,” Hong Yi chuckles.
*
There is something distinctly faded about this old hotel, as they venture up the rugged staircase to the second floor. The walls are striped in yellow and white, wallpaper that might have looked more at home fifty years ago. Decades’ worth of lint gather on the carpets, onto which light spills from the windows.
Following the trio, Dorian takes Honourless to the family suite, stepping aside for Hong Yi to unlock the door.
It gives way with a creak, to reveal…three beds. He sighs.
“Will Honourless be on the couch as before?” asks Dorian as they file into the yellow-walled suite. He is already stepping towards the couch—but Vesper intercepts him with her arm.
“No, not one more time,” she says, then drops her pack on the couch seat and points him to the nearest bed. Making no reply, he lays the woman down on the covers, then bows his greeting and turns back to the corridor.
By the time she lays down on her chosen bed, Marcia can already feel the infection creeping up her leg—a different beast from what she knows, tingling like a pinched nerve.
When she narrows her attention upon the infection, it burns and aches. There is no reprieve after a few minutes of stinging; it has gone deeper. She slumps against the backboard, wondering if this is a fight she can win.
Marcia once heard about a grisly siege strategy from her commanders, in which the disemboweled corpses of plague victims were lobbed over the walls to infect the dissidents within. It was then, as she smeared her sword with manure in the hours before battle, that she learned that war is not always a contest of force: even the mightiest succumb when black sores break out across their bodies and blood fills their lungs.
But she has also heard about the Roman legions who torch the cities that stand too proud against the imperial cause. When fire is put to the walls, none survive but the few who flee in time. It is the spirit of united peoples that razing seeks to destroy. A fire can ruin a city beyond saving, all its sick, and all its healthy…
Her eyelids dip. She tries again, tries burning the wound. The chill of impending fever sweeps across her body.
When she opens her eyes, Hong Yi is sitting in the next bed, extending his device in one hand with a frown that furrows his brow. She takes it and begins to spell out her words. It's easier now.
Usually, it is heat and pain that burn the infection away. I can force a fever, and whatever else it needs. But I do not know how much will be enough.
When she hands back the device, Hong Yi glances over the words. Where she took a minute to tap out her words, he needs only seconds: “Your thinking is sound. The rabies virus cannot survive a strong enough heat. Your body will become better at fighting the infection the more familiar it grows. But if this fails…we must take you to a hospital.”
Her eyes drift to the bandage. The siege is within her. “Four days. If I am not recovering by then, then do that.”
He nods. She needs no more words. There are worse places, and worse times, to face her possible death.
Closing her eyes, she lets her attention narrow in on the wounds.
It doesn't take long for Marcia to descend into the throes of a fever like no other. Hong Yi watches as she grows too weak to keep upright, and takes to curling under a blanket. She is shivery, and speaks in stops and starts, when offered his smartphone; by then, she can barely lift herself even to eat the snacks he has picked up from downstairs.
Hong Yi does not notice when morning segues into afternoon. Neither has slept in a day, but he and Vesper quickly agree to take turns keeping watch over her and liaising with the duchess down the hall.
“Orobelle.” When Dorian opens the suite door, he pokes his head through, steeling his face.
The duchess lazily looks up from the mattress, lowering her journal and pen. “What is it?”
“It’s Marcia. She was bitten, by one of the wolves. The illness they had, that's how it's transmitted, and she—”
“She what? She has powers of healing, doesn't she?”
“Orobelle, you must understand. This disease has a perfect fatality rate. Unless some miracle happens, it will kill her…”
Her face contorts into something akin to frustration. “What do you want?” Her voice is stern, but cautiously open.
“For now, money for food. She needs food. We do too, but she needs it the most. Please.”
Before she parts with the tenge, Hong Yi catches Orobelle looking to Dorian, though for what, he cannot tell. Once the money is in his hand, he has no more interest in knowing. As he scrambles down the stairs, he runs a quick search of the local stores, and then dashes out the lobby door.
The dining choices in the city of Arkalyk are not like any he has seen before, but then again, Kazakhstan is not like any country he has visited. This is a town that grew out from its mines, and he sees its age and industry at every turn. Workers line up for lunch in the chilly sun, dust powdering their jackets. There is always a distant churn of machinery, rumbling down the roads like a heartbeat.
Wonder what Honourless was thinking about that brought us to this place, he thinks, as he peers over the menu options and starts typing the characters into his browser. At the front of the queue, he apologises in English when the shopkeeper attempts to greet him in Kazakh—but she understands the word, sorry, and they proceed in sentence fragments, enough to string together a transaction from.
Four packets of palaw under his arm, Hong Yi jogs back up the windy road. He pours pieces of grit out of his shoes at the suite door, shaking off the last of the cold.
The pale blue curtains are still drawn when he enters. Vesper sits on the floor by Marcia's head, their gazes unwaveringly locked. In the next bed, Honourless lies heartily snoring.
There is little space to spare here between the kitchenette, the table, and the beds, all packed into a narrow rectangular unit. He stops at the kitchen counter attached to the wall, barely wide enough for all four packs.
“Lunch is here!” he announces.
Vesper looks up. “That smells delicious.” She rises to her knees.
He rummages through the cutlery drawer. “Is she doing okay?”
“I don't know. She can barely speak.”
“Less than ideal,” he mutters. “Don't let me distract you from her.”
“Oh, we're not doing much. It's about time I sorted out food and water for myself, anyway. Do you have an aspirin?”
“I have modern meds that do the same as aspirin. But surely she can control her fever if she made it happen on purpose?”
“I…I don’t know that we should leave her battling a fever this high alone. I can feel the heat radiating off of her.” Vesper walks to the sink and plucks open the cabinet under it with a squeak. “If she's not improving in two days, we're taking her to the doctor.” She drops a kettle on the table and knees the door shut, brow furrowed. “She really reckons she can survive rabies.”
“I mean, with the vaccine, we could, too. I suspect she is basically giving herself the vaccine.”
“Is it contagious?” Vesper turns on the tap and puts the kettle under it.
“No human has ever transmitted it to another. And even if it were possible…she just got bitten a few hours ago, it wouldn’t be infectious yet.”
“Are you sure? This disease is fatal.”
“Yeah, I’ve done some reading. I really wouldn’t lean on guesswork here.”
“Reading…on your phone?” He nods.
“Quid dicis?” Marcia mumbles.
Vesper’s eyes dart to her, then flick upward in thought. “De ti,” she answers.
“De mē?” Marcia answers, smiling hazily.
“Sí. De tu salud.”
“Gratias tibi, mel.” With a small smile, Marcia’s head drops back to the pillow.
After a pause, Vesper grins with a shake of her head, putting the kettle on the stove.
Hong Yi glances at her. “I didn't know you spoke Spanish,” he says.
“Mum’s side of the family does,” she answers.
Amid the hiss of the stove, Hong Yi starts to unwrap his palaw on the corner table, stomach growling. “That's so cool. Do you understand what she’s saying?”
“Just enough. I'm surprised I can make out anything at all. Last thing she said was something like, ‘thank you, honey.’”
“Wow, she's flirting with you.”
“Ha, very funny. Anyway, reckon we could learn Latin with your phone’s translator?”
“Good thinking. Even better, actually. I can get us a Latin reference book.”
By now, Hong Yi has already grappled with the quality of the hotel’s wireless network. While the stove hisses, he pulls out his phone and lays it beside his lunch. Learn Latin. The app store disconnects in sputters. Icons fail to load. He picks the first free app he sees.
Five minutes into watching the loading bar crawl, he sighs, “This might take a bit.”
The whistle of the kettle stirs the room. “Well, that's all right—tea?” Vesper calls.
“Sure, I'll have some.”
“Black, green, Tashkent…”
“Whoa, I've never had Tashkent tea, maybe that.”
“Fair enough.” He hears the fridge door open as he digs into his rice with a spoon. The loading spinner spins stubbornly.
Vesper soon has four mugs of tea ready, two of which she places on the bedside tables, with an unanswered tap on Marcia's shoulder. Then she brings the remaining two to Hong Yi. He is already camped at the table facing the sink, squinting at his smart phone through gleaming glasses.
He is—she thinks as she pulls up the chair beside him—the only one she understands. It’s hard not to like his company; he is chatty and genuine, qualities in short supply among this traveling party. But even then, she senses there is more there than he makes available to acquaintance.
“So, did you grow up in New York?” she ventures as she sits.
His eyes dart from the screen to her, and then he laughs. “Easy mistake,” he says. “I was in New York on a three-day vacation. Orobelle just has the best timing. Or the worst.”
“Oh, do I know it,” she answers. “You were on a date on vacation? Did you know Terri before you got there?”
“Nah. I met her the day before—saved her pet parrot from a gazebo roof. I couldn't even make that up if I tried. We decided to go on a date the day I was meant to leave for Boston.”
“Ah…is that common in your world? Going on dates with people you just met?”
“Sometimes we even go on dates with people we've never met.” Hong Yi points at his phone. “Like I said, you can do anything on the internet. Including meet your dream boy or girl and get stood up on the first date.”
“That sounds…er…chaotic.”
“Oh, trust me, that's the least of it. What's it like where you're from?”
“What, the dating?” Hong Yi nods. “It couldn't be more different.” She steeples her fingers before her mug. “It's all about getting married in the end. So eligible men go pick up eligible women, and they date with the objective of having a family. It’s all protocol and expectations, in the end.”
“And that isn't your speed, I'm guessing?”
Vesper laughs. “‘Twas never in my thoughts. No one in my town interested me enough to make that prospect sound bearable…strolling across that same bridge every couple in town crosses on the first date, with someone I hardly cared for.” She straightens, picking up her spoon. “And then I became a soldier, and there was no time.”
“That would do it,” Hong Yi chuckles. “But you're happy like that?”
“I think so. I have not a clue how I would feel about dating.” Then she pauses. “Sorry we took you away from your world. And your date.”
“Hey, it's okay. I don't always get to choose what happens to me, and that's fine.”
“Is it?”
His eyes are full of thought. “I dunno, I just roll with the punches.”
She can't imagine simply accepting it, being snatched away from the world. She did feel as if he acquiesced too quickly. Even with the war driving her away, she would have demanded to visit her parents at the first opportunity. And surely Hong Yi would have more at stake than she does…
“You’re more patient than I am,” she says simply.
“Yeah, I don't go running after rabid wolves,” he laughs. “What was your rank in the army?”
“I was a Captain. I had a few platoons under my command.”
“O captain, my captain!”
“Not that kind of captain,” she chuckles. “It’s not as prestigious as it sounds.”
“Sure, big shot. They didn't give you much in the way of clothes, though, did they.”
“It’s bollocks, isn't it? Whyever would a walking corpse need three changes of clothes?”
“At least you had a toothbrush. I guess.” He glances down. “Oh—the app’s ready! Fucking finally. Are you ready to learn some declensions?”
*
Declension, or the way a word “declines” from its infinitive form within its sentence context, is a style of conjugation that Hong Yi has only ever encountered before in Spanish. By way of scientific terminology, however, he has seen Latin conjugation in action, and that makes it only a touch easier.
As they pore over the digital book over their lunch, swiping the pages left and right, Vesper seems to get something entirely different out of it. “Ah, vacca! I thought that might mean ‘cow.’”
“Oh right, like ‘vache.’”
“Do you know Spanish?”
He grins, rubbing his neck. “I know some grammar. And functionally a hundred words. Now, how would we say… ‘We are learning Latin?’ Might be good for Marcia to know…”
“To learn. ‘Discere’…if we were to say we are learning…well, it says here that Latin doesn't have an equivalent for present continuous tense…”
In the mists of her fever, Marcia crawls up against the backboard and picks up the receptacle of what may be tea, left there an unnameable number of minutes or hours ago. As she sips the cold liquid, she catches snatches of the conversation between Hong Yi and Vesper, a few words she knows mingled with ones she doesn't.
“We are learning Latin,” she hears, then, and at once she listens closer. More English, something she can't understand, and then, What do you need?
From here, she can see the diligence glowing in their faces, eyes reflecting the yellow of the walls. Her mind is too fogged by the heat for her to decide how to react. She turns slowly, neck aching. Honourless is asleep.
Her head spins, and she cannot see. Her stomach roils. She needs the latrine. She inches out of the bed, shivering, and rises on her feet, teetering as she vaguely realises someone has removed her sandals and helmet…
“Need help?” calls Hong Yi.
She groans a wordless answer, afraid to lift her head.
They are both there in a flash—or perhaps it has been minutes—steadying her by the shoulders. She wants to see their faces better, but her vision is too bright.
This runaway fever, she has been allowing to run its course. She fears retreating too soon, letting the sickness win, like a starving lion on the sand.
But she cannot last out this burning forever. She must be careful, must maintain command over herself…
They are muttering to each other in the rolling tones of English, as she stumbles through a doorway onto the cold ceramic tiling, held by both hands. The noise is getting too much; her vision is flashing. Her face grows cold. She sinks forward and vomits on the drain, crumpling to her knees.