21. Culis Manor
Culis Manor
O n the first morning Mila awakened in Culis Manor, she almost didn’t recognise herself. It was the first time she could remember that she hadn’t been awakened by Jezebel’s rampant lust or terrifying moods. She lay quietly in bed and allowed herself to luxuriate for a moment in the peacefulness of her surroundings and the utter novelty of being alone. Her room was a simple stone turret, located on the ground floor, and annexed to the kitchen. It had a small, arched window seat with a white cushion that looked out over the kitchen gardens. There were birds outside. The bed was a flat, hard pallet that hung suspended by heavy chains from the ceiling and swayed gently when she lay in it. The mattress was soft, the linen clean. She could see sunlight curling past the glass and hear the muted bustling of the morning’s breakfast being prepared on the other side of the door. Fresh bread and some kind of stewed, spiced fruit by the smell of it. Her stomach grumbled, and Mila realised she might have an appetite again .
She had also been provided an option of clothes. Three modest shift dresses hung from a tiny wardrobe in the corner: blue, green and yellow. Their irregular fading was the only indicator that they weren’t new; otherwise, they were clean and well-fitting. She stripped herself gratefully from the swamp-creature gown and donned the simple blue one slowly. She closed her eyes with a deep inhale and exhale before turning to the simple mirror in the corner and opening them.
It was the first time she’d seen her reflection since the seamstress’s townhouse, and she was worried about what she’d find.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. All the essential parts of her were still intact. Long limbs, small nose, almond eyes, all still present and functioning. The gold rings in her ears rung out merrily, easily seen without her long hair to hide them.
But she was skeletal, and something, a spark, was missing in her eyes. She felt like she was looking at a ghost. She turned away.
She was nervous about what the rest of the day would bring, and what Culis’s expectations of her would be, but so far, this was a vast improvement from her previous situation.
The reception she received from the household staff when she left the safety of her small room was similar to what she’d experienced from the staff at Jezebel’s apartments: fear and curiosity. It was highly likely that the kitchen staff had never seen a demon before, and by the looks they gave her, it seemed they half expected her to burst into flame and destroy the place on a whim.
Shakily, a serving girl held out a plate with a few thick slices of buttered bread and a little bowl filled with cinnamon-stewed apple. Mila smiled warmly at her and took it gratefully.
After she dipped the first bit of bread into the pot and placed it into her mouth, it abruptly became a battle to mind her manners and not scarf the rest of it down. She hadn’t realised how hungry and depleted she was until that moment. Incredibly conscious that she was being stared at by the entirety of the kitchen staff, she did her best to eat with as much civility as possible, and then proceeded to wash her face and hair in the sweet water provided to her in a jug and bowl by another maid.
After breakfast, she went out into the kitchen gardens and wiggled her bare feet in the soil.
It was amazing, the feel of the cool earth against her bare skin. It connected her back to herself more fully than even the full night’s sleep had done.
She opened her eyes and surveyed the garden, scanning for any greenery that looked familiar.
And there it was, in the corner, growing weakly against a stone, a small tuft of rubane.
Mila ran towards the tiny red leaves and swiftly plucked them from the rich soil. There wasn’t enough of it to even cover her palm, but it was something. She fought the urge to crush it and inhale the scent of the oil directly. It would work, but smoking it would be more effective…
No! She reined in the thought before it could mature. The withdrawals she’d endured for weeks from this weed had been bad. She was now free from its hold for the first time in years. She knew the control over her power that she’d now spent three months honing was worth hanging onto, essential even, for her survival here.
But still…tempting. She turned it over in her palm and carried it back to her room as though it were a small, precious child. She placed it in her windowsill to dry, sighing with happiness. Something about having access to even a small amount of rubane put her even more at ease in this space .
She contemplated staying in the small, quiet room for the rest of the day and pretending the world didn’t exist for a while longer, but eventually, she realised it would come find her anyway, so she may as well be on the front foot.
With that, she left the room, and the rubane, and went to find the man who had purchased her.
Her plan was thwarted when it quickly became apparent that Culis was not in the manor. The staff she came upon all seemed too afraid of her to talk, so she assumed he must be out on business. For a moment, it felt odd and empty to not see Jahan amongst the ranks of household staff. She hadn’t realised how accustomed she’d grown to seeing him out of the corner of her eye most days.
Rather than returning to the small bedroom to wait for Culis to come get her, Mila decided to explore every nook of his house while she seemingly still had the freedom to do so. She wasn’t sure how this arrangement was going to play out once he returned, but she’d be a fool not to make the most of the relative freedom she had at the moment.
The staff avoided her as she passed them, and although she recognised no one, she was not stopped or questioned about her movements around the house, not even when she was headed towards Culis’s private rooms. She wondered what he had said to them about her before her arrival – if anything. She wondered if Baird would get in trouble for letting her wander like this. After three months behaving as Jezebel’s shadow, it felt wrong to now have so much freedom.
The decor of the house was curious. In the hallways and rooms that one would commonly expect visitors to be received by a host, everything was rather bland. These spaces lacked any distinctive character and were not dissimilar to the decor in the other houses of nobility she’d seen during Jezebel’s social visits .
However, other parts of the manor, including the private rooms, and even the servants’ hallways, were a different story. They were full of…clutter. Dark green hallways were lined floor to ceiling with plants, shells, stones, statues, artwork, trinkets, valuables, rubbish…everything that Culis had evidently collected during a lifetime of travels that he hadn’t deemed worth selling for a profit but still, evidently, appreciated.
Mila ran her fingers gently over some of them. The carved mud figure of a pregnant goddess, a primitive sword with the handle broken, a charcoal sketch of two people, who may or may not have been Culis and a chieftain standing arm in arm.
Fascinating. She’d always thought of him as a man motivated by nothing but greed, but here was proof of something else, proof he was someone who valued items that objectively had no value.
This knowledge made her feel far more calm about the decision she’d made to enter his world.
That is, until she entered the last, windowless room.
The room’s energy swamped her like a tidal wave, nearly bowling her over.
Death .
Mila stood in the doorway, gasping in agony, silently drowning in the thick, syrupy darkness for three full heartbeats before she was finally capable of stepping back and slamming the door.
The images burned into her retinas. A large wooden table stood in the middle of the room, an altar, she realised, caked with dried, brown blood. All around it were different shaped knives. Some of them clean, some of them lying in disarray from recent use. Threatening black symbols had been scrawled onto the whitewashed stone walls, black paint dripping down like blood onto the floor. There were mummified animals splayed out across sticks and hanging from the ceiling. A number of human skulls sat piled in the dark corner.
It was beyond horrifying.
Was this a form of private worship Culis secretly conducted? Was this why he wanted her here? To hold her across that table and cut her throat as some kind of sick offering to Viah?
Panic flooded her, and she turned and ran. She had to get out of here, and she had to leave while she still could. Nothing was holding her here. Yet.
I have to get out, I have to get out.
She found a small side servants’ door that led into the sweet, hot summer air of the outside world, and pushed her way out of the suffocating hallway, stumbling into the open sunlight. From there, she ran towards the tree line in the distance.
But after only a few steps, she had enough presence of mind to realise she wouldn’t get far that way. She was exhausted, her body too depleted from her captivity at the palace.
Instead, she whirled and ran to a large structure nearby, hoping to find somewhere that was simply away from the manor, somewhere she might hide, regain her composure, and make a proper plan of escape.
When she arrived at the building and pushed her way inside, she instantly realised her mistake. The structure wasn’t a quiet stable or shed. It was a warehouse, and its calm exterior had been very misleading. Inside, it was noisy and bustling with men and women running about on the warehouse floor, yelling loudly to one another as wooden crates were being stacked high, lining the walls.
Mila watched as a crate was hooked and lifted from the floor to the stacks by a giant piece of machinery, pulleys powered by a team of sweating draft horses and bare-chested, sweating men.
This was not the quiet escape she’d hoped it would be .
Mila tried to turn back the way she’d come, but as she spun around, a voice cut through the bustle and stopped her in her tracks.
“Good morning, little demon!” Culis called out.
She turned in horror towards the sound of his voice and flinched when he swiftly approached her. He didn’t seem to notice her fear.
In fact, he smiled broadly down at her as he gestured proudly at the operation around them and said with pride, “What do you think?”
Unlike most of the other men, he still wore his shirt, but the sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and sweat patches stained his collar. The thick bun of his hair still sat high, but the pieces that usually sat tousled around his temple now lay slick against his head. He had dust streaks on his forehead from where his hands had worked to keep the sweat from his eyes. The gold earring remained clean and glinting. He’d clearly been labouring, and he looked very pleased with himself.
Somehow, seeing him this way calmed her. Although the specifics of his energy remained a puzzle, his body language was open and carefree, and suddenly it seemed very hard to reconcile the unholy room in the manor with someone who seemed so happy to be getting his hands dirty with manual labour.
“We try to get the heavy lifting done before the real heat sets in,” Culis was explaining. “These three crates –” he gestured, “– need to be on the road by midday if they’re to reach Prious by tomorrow morning. They’re full of lanterns for the upcoming evening harvest, and I have it on good authority that the Guild of Merchants had a similar shipment come into Traders Bay yesterday. I need our stock to reach Prious first.”
Mila had been young when she’d lived in the large eastern region of Prious, but she still remembered the evening harvests that were held across every farming village and town, the way the lanterns had floated low, spilling light over the fields to allow work in the cool of the summer nights. It was essential work. Prious owned the vast Artor farming plains and was the veritable breadbasket of the nation. The people who lived there were renowned for their salt-of-the-earth attitudes and their pride in providing the country with most of its maize, grain and wheat products. As the night harvest only occurred for a limited time every year, Mila could understand why the lantern market was small and competitive.
Culis’s sweaty face gleamed as he watched the crates that contained the lanterns being lowered onto carts. The muted energy rolling from him was suddenly slightly clearer to Mila as his shoulder inadvertently bumped against hers. It was only the tiniest moment of contact, but she enjoyed the unusual clarity. The energy of satisfaction and pleasure rolling from him was reassuring. It was the first time she’d been in his presence without feeling as though he was somehow tailoring himself for her perception. It also put her even more at ease about what she’d seen in the room of death. There had to be a reasonable explanation for it, she assured herself.
The moment didn’t last long.
Once he was satisfied that the carts were loaded and moving onto the road, he abruptly moved away, and she was blind to him once more. He gestured for her to accompany him back to the manor and noticed when she baulked in fear.
“What’s the matter?” he asked impatiently. “Come inside, before we steam to death out here.”
“I found your room of death,” she blurted out. “If your plan is to kill me, I’d rather it not be a surprise. Just tell me.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, no less impatient. “What room? Ohh…” A light of comprehension flickered on in his eyes. “Yes, I can see how that’d be a frightening thing to stumble across. Come on, I’ll show you it properly. And, no , I’m not intending on killing you. Not unless you really piss me off,” he said with a grin. “You’re safe from me for a while at least. I’ve paid far too much money to not get my pound of flesh from you first.”
His tone was jovial, as if he was thoroughly amused that she’d suspected he might kill her on the first day he’d acquired her. When she thought about it more, she supposed it was improbable. He had paid a lot of money for her, and he had plans he needed her help with. All things considered, she was probably safe for the moment.
So, she followed him back to the manor, and he took her directly back to the dreaded room.