The Cat Who Knew How to Cry

4. SUSPICIONS (part 2)

"I'm glad you found the time to speak with me, Irson," the man said, extending a strong, tanned hand toward the Tanae.

"How could I refuse?" Irson wondered if he should invite his guest to take a seat – in certain countries it would be construed as tactless coming from an immortal creature to a mortal one, an allusion of sorts to the latter's decrepitude.

"When I found out what happened to your father... His life shouldn't have ended like it did," said the guest, balling his fists painfully.

"It took me a long time to accept his decision... his death, Uncle Restes. I know what you're going through right now."

Irson had gone through it all himself many years ago, when, upon returning home after a long stint at the Lindorg Academy of Magic, he didn't recognize his parents. Just as a bottle of perfume loses its scent when the owners forget to close it before leaving, so had carefree joy escaped, evaporated from his home. No longer was his father playing his silly-looking, knotted pipe while wearing a tall snake-charmer's hat – an old friend's wedding present – over his fire-red mane; nor was his mother playing along by climbing into a wide basket and performing one of those hypnotic, exotic dances she had learned from her years studying at Tialianna's Temple. Throughout his childhood it was only these performances that reminded Irson that his parents were of different races, that Irson Sr. was a mortal man, while Ilshiyarris was a High Tanae, the forever-young daughter one of Serpent's Eye's oldest priest bloodlines. They looked the same age...

But now, with her soft ivory skin, her hair, light and thin as spider silk, and her supple agile body, Ilshiyarris could easily be taken for her husband's late daughter. A daughter who loved most deeply him who would inevitably leave her...

Irson could barely recognize the infinitely dear features of his father under the webs of wrinkles. At first he even thought that he had caught some alien virus or mishandled some new spell. And then, after realizing the truth of the situation, cursed himself for allowing Irson Sr. to persuade him to attend Lindorg, thereby fulfilling his own unfulfilled childhood dream. How could he have not realized that these three decades might become his father's last? Irson would have given up the world to correct his mistake, to spend those precious years here, at the Northern Bridge, with those he truly loved, and not in the company of stuck-up, soulless sorcerers! In a fit of fury he tried to burn, break, grind to dust his cursed Lindorgite staff, as if it was the leech that had sucked all the joy from his life. But, of course, he had failed.

His mother – so pale that the pearly scales on her cheeks and forehead melted into her skin – spoke in perpetual whisper, so low that it might seem to an outsider that she feared disturbing someone or being overheard. He found it unbearable to live in this abode of quiet sorrow and slowly waning life. Being immortal, he just couldn't understand why his father wanted to leave this world so soon, especially since the option of escaping old age and death was right there for the taking. Even if the family savings and Ilshiyarris' contacts in Naeria[1] weren't enough to persuade one of the body manufacturers to defy Veindor and make an immortal body for a mortal, nothing prevented them from finding a willing craftsman somewhere in the outer reaches of Enhiarg, maybe even outside its borders where the Merciful's influence wasn't nearly as ubiquitous. And yet, his parent's weren't doing anything...

"I see you've moved nearly all their furniture here," said Restes, brushing his finger along a commode, its surface covered with incrustations of tiny pearl-white snakes coiling around orange solar disks. His parents would sometimes jest that the snakes were their family crest.

"Yes," said Irson with unexpected heaviness, startled that the memories would weigh on him so. It was as if he had dove into a deceptively shallow lake for a carelessly dropped key, and before he knew it he was swimming in perilous murky depths, with the cold thickness of the water pressing on him from all sides, and the seaweed trying to bind his hands and feet. "Mother decided to sell the house with all the furnishings. I couldn't stand the thought of losing it all."