All Thy Sins Remembered - Confess To Me

I no longer remember where we'd met up, or why. My memory does however, remember that we found ourselves in the Great Stadium of Ar. I loathe this particular arena, with the cloistering of people; the smell of sweat and perfume is as thick as the crowds that push and shove to get to the men hawking drinks from their carts. The noise is enough to drive a sane man mad, the cries, the laughter, and the cheering. It appears this is a part of what it is to be Arian. I am not Arian.

I prodded him for information on Damos, and too, of this sister he has spoken of more than once. Rather than getting the information I wanted, I got the information I all ready had by observation alone. He is vulnerable. It is part of what makes him beautiful, that shuddering naive vulnerability. The world spins, and the Musician he is unaware even when he is its axis. Or so I surmised after the one evening with him and Venor.

My attempts to delve further, to sate my own agendas, were thwarted by the appearance of a woman I'd seen once before. I don't know her name, but she seems to know mine, and she took an immediate liking to Venor. Perhaps it was his frustration with the woman that was irritating him. Or perhaps my own instigation of the situation and manipulation of the conversation to further incense his discomfort, but he touched me. Twice. He seemed pleased I did nothing, though I did pointedly look. A touch to the thigh. A slap to the arm. Small, easily overlooked. They were noted.

He requested my escort back to the Metellan. I obliged him, again, for my own reasons. It was here our path detoured and to the Diamond Back. I hadn't returned there since the day I was taken away in manacles as a prisoner of Ar. I remembered everything as if it had been just days before. The memories like reels of tape unwinding with the scent of the overgrown garden or the sound of the old gate's hinges. The tarns that circled overhead. The Arian Guard that surrounded the Estate. It took an entire city to get him back. I took him from under the Taurentians' noses. There hadn't been such an insult to their supposed skill since the disappearance of the Hinrabian.

The past, is just that. And the house when we entered was much the same as when I'd left it, just laden with far more dust than I remembered. Nex had been staying here on and off, but I had not seem him in some time and not surprisingly he was absent from the house when we arrived. "Why have you brought me here?" he asked. "For two reasons," I answered in earnest and led him down the narrow stairwell into the basement. It was here, in the damp and cold confines of a storage cellar, that I unearthed pieces of my past. Macabre paintings, he seemed curious of but never inquired about, were piled in trunks. While I dug through the mire, the boxes and the crates for something in particular, he in the darkness of the room confessed. Revealing his life in sordid details, and I listened. I listened to all of it.

"Ah-ha, I found it," lifting some some of the books off an old dark wooden case I removed the box and put it down before him on the cold stone floor. The worn surface was burned with a tribal design, one that seemed lost on him and I was inclined to allow him to remain ignorant for now. Inside however he did not need explanation. They were kaissa pieces, carved of bone. Mwoga had given them to me during my expendition in the jungles, and my visit to the various Ukungu villages along the lake Ngao. It was a trade for service. Now it was in the hands of Venor.

We left the basement and returned to the parlor. I did not ask him this time if he wanted a drink, I merely gave him one and he drank without protest. Here, to his queries, I revealed some insight into my own makings while looking beyond the drapery and to the Metellan streets outside. Men are determined at birth the path they will follow. Their caste is determined. Sometimes even their companion. My own nature is irrefutable. I was determined to be this. Not all are destined to be heros. Some of us, we're destined to be the reason men fall.

We discussed intensely the finer points of the city's corruption. His own appointment was in my eyes answer enough, and he could not gainsay this. Ar rots from within, teeming with criminals at her very heart's core. I am not to blame for her fall from grace, but I will profit from it. In this I feel no remorse.

Finally, comfortable, he asked of me idly as I sat on the edge of the desk in the parlor, "What was the second thing you brought me here for?" With a crook to finger I beckoned him, and he rose, moving to stand before me with an air of apprehension I could have licked off the tip of my finger. Sliding from the table, I stood before him as well, snaking my hand through his hair in which to coil as my lips grazed his cheek and his jaw line. He didn't trust me, and he reached for my opposite hand, perhaps anticipating a knife. When nothing was to be found, I felt a subtle relaxation of the musculature in his frame close to my own. A kiss, he coveted a kiss.

It was then with that grip in his hair I slammed his face into the desk bent over, rattling the ledgers and spraying blood across the wall. I followed him down, leaning to whisper against his ear, "If you ever fucking strike me again, the next I see you, I will have your balls removed with wire clippers." "Understood," he growled around his own bloody saliva.

It appeared the Magistrate thought I had forgotten. I hadn't.

Startled, pained, and likely angry he lunged and fell atop me. Acrid jibes gave way to the persuasion of a knife into his side, then finally an impatiently abrupt bodily removal of him. Bleeding and bruised, he crouched like an animal upon the floor, staring at me as I rose and gathered my belongings without further animosity. As we parted ways, he again laid bare confession, "I am fond of a killer."

And another falls.