by Jae Loren
Excerpt from:
Afternoon Ceylon, A Chroniker, & the Shattered Looking Glass
Book VI. The Poison Forwards: Anarchia Nella Steppa
I: The Copper Bones
With her head turned on an angle, the bright glare of the overhead fluorescent out of her immediate vision, she could see the two people that had entered the room more clearly. A man, not so tall or short, dressed in a white coat and large, circular spectacles, stared at her while wringing his hands. His companion, a tall willowy female with dramatically high hair and impeccable makeup held a bored, disinterested expression as she looked at the young woman.
The man grinned, “It’s truly my pleasure to say: welcome. My beloved Alys Blue.”
She blinked, surprise melting away into irritation, fingers tightening on his wristbone; but he dismissed the darkening expression on her face with an all-too-friendly smile. The woman behind him snorted. “Perhaps you should answer her question Vjola, before your beloved creation threatens you again.”
“Question? Yes, yes… introductions. Hrm.” He scratched a part of his balding head, the patch of skin thinly covered in wispy strands, “I suppose so. I’m Vjola. Señor Vjola, the cause of your current… appearance, shall I say? You’re welcome, by the way, for saving your life.”
His words were coming too fast, her throat too dry to match his speaking pace. “Who-”
“And this,” The doctor reached for a hand of the woman beside him, but she easily avoided his grasp, expression betraying no thought to the movement, “lovely woman is the owner of this place. Madam, care to tell any more of yourself?”
The Madam sniffed, “I’ve known you for years Vjola, and not even you have made it into my private confidence.” Giving the girl on the metal pallet a condescending look-over, she made a sweeping gesture with her hands. “I will go have a set of clothing fetched. Even if you may find such peculiarities to your liking, the rest of us have propriety in mind.”
Without waiting for an answer, the Madam left the dingy chamber on unhurried feet, taking the stone steps up to the door at her own pace. She had left the chamber completely by the time the physician responded, his mind back on the task at hand.
“Yes, yes, we will be right here.” The physician leaned over her body, one eye made rather large by the singular magnifying lens held by a metal rod on the headpiece he slipped on from somewhere. The young woman missed the movement as she had watched the Madam make her exit.
“Pupils look satisfactory. Skin is sickly in pallor, but that’s a normal consequence of the adaptation. That should fade given enough time.” He tilted his head, “How do you feel?”
“N-aked.” The syllables scraped against her insides. It was odd, disgusting, even: feeling skin instead of the numb, heavy weight of metal all around. Without her shields, it was as though the chattering physician could see inside of her, stripped as she was of her comforts in armor. She rotated her shoulders slowly, testing the joints, her weightless limbs, coughed. “Where am I?”
Placing his hand in his bag, Vjola handed over a skin bottle, watched in rapt attention as she drank deeply of the salty liquid within. It wasn’t water- but her thirst faded rapidly as the drink spilled down her throat. When the doctor handed her a damp cloth, she used the scratchy surface to scrub the tacky residue of the wet-mask from her face.
“The electrolyte boost should take care of your dry throat; this is your first time using your new voice after all. As for your question: in the lower level of the Purple Room. Although this basement in particular could be considered a division of the Madam’s boudoir, if you will. Oh- I wouldn’t move so fast- you have to readjust before you can attempt that.”
Dizziness sent her back against the flat pallet, aluminum corners digging into her spine, legs wobbly on the ground. She tried not to let it affect her. Images of fire and bombs exploded in the back of her head, a memory to the present. Something had happened in the palace. She stood despite her fatigue, taking a breath to calm the screaming urge to rest. Throat soothed by the water, her words came out stronger, “Where is the Queen?”
The doctor tapped the fingers of his hands together, “I really do not think you should be worrying about all that. You just woke up-”
She rolled her shoulders again, feeling the muscles protest, but not weakly. The more she tested them, the firmer they started to become. “I will recover shortly.”
Vjola clucked his tongue in blatant admonition. “Not quick enough. Trust me: lie down, let me make a few more calculations, and then I will answer all the questions you may have. I refuse to say another word on the matter until I’m satisfied that everything is in order.”
If she had her usual strength, she could have pushed him aside with ease, but it would take longer than a few minutes to fully get her bearings, to get used to this form. With a relenting grunt, she laid back on the pallet.
“That’s a girl. Not so bad is it? Now just let me compare a few more observations…”
He poked and prodded at her body: testing the elasticity of her skin, tracing the pattern of veins beneath the surface, the color of her tongue, the edges of her teeth, even the play of bones in her legs and feet, murmuring to himself the entire while. When he was finally satisfied, he stepped back and made a grunt of approval. With hands that were far to gentle for her liking, he assisted her as she began to rise once more.
She probably was in one of the hidden rooms of the palace, the ‘Purple Room’ a space Her Majesty had created possibly some time before. Even in all her years in the Grand House, she had not discovered all its nooks and chambers. There was never any need to. Odd, but such a thought would never have occurred to her. Such ideas hadn’t been thought in a long while. Not since-
“Slowly, slowly. It’s a good thing we found you when we did, especially in all the confusion afterwards. They had probably left you out to rust away in the desert, what with that humongous body of armor you had.”
She frowned, her pulse throbbing a rapid tattoo. The memory of smoke cloude her mind, flooding all but her olfactory senses. “Is the Queen in her personal rooms?”
Vjola blinked, “The Queen? Oh- I suppose you still think yourself to be in the Grand House. This is not the royal palace, I’m afraid, although many would say they prefer to be here. Hmn. I guess this is where one would say ‘Welcome to Copper Lake’, wouldn’t it be?”
At her confusion he rattled on, taking off his headpiece. “It is not so long a ride from the Grand House to our town. Well… actually it is; but we made sure to hurry you back here before the damage grew more extensive. But now that you’re up and soon to be about, I’m sure everything will work out fine.” He inclined his body forward in an inquisitive, clinical manner, “Now- the physical portion of my examination is finished; before we can even begin to rehabilitate you, I will have to test your mental functions as well. Wouldn’t want to go through all the trouble only to realize your brain’s a complete mash. That wouldn’t be good. Not to worry, it’s a simple enough memory exercise. We’ll dispense with the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ queries, however. First question: where were you born?”
The words whispered over her mind. She could almost see it. Maybe she had even dreamed of it: trees, pit-fires, cool rushing waters with smooth black rocks, a yellow flower. Dozens of golden blossoms peppering the riverside. “The Currents.”
Vjola looked at her sharply, but his smile was ever present. “The river-side villages, eh? Would be nice to see one of those once again. Nothing left but dead clearings and burial hills. Do you know what happened to those hamlets? What destroyed our land?”
A small man, beady eyes that stared through in defiance, a circular object leaking fumes into the red-tinted air. “A bomb?” she tested the word, searched for the proper term, “Something… in the air.”
His glasses glinted as he made an approving sound. “We call it the Brilliant Toxin, although the most admirable thing about it is how the poison’s select molecular structure transformed ev
erything it touched. The air, the ground, people. Do you know who did it? And why?”
She thought of those beady eyes again, the dark slicked hair and angry expression. “Rat Shanks, an anarchist-” show them all, my pet. “-he wanted to kill the Queen.”
Vjola nodded his head, “Yes, yes, that’s good enough. Let’s try your short term memory, shall we? Where are you now?”
“The Purple Room: Copper Lake?” she tested the words, a vague thought of a mining town a hundred kilometers from the palace entering her brain. He would know, she thought, and tried to link again, only to hear empty air as a response.
She jarred herself back to the present. The strange man was talking again. “What?”
“I said, ‘What is your name’. Can you remember that?”
It was a simple question, and she knew the answer. State your name, my pet. The whispered trigger statement was a prompt to her memory, as it had always been. She parted her lips, the sound ready to leave her throat when her tongue swelled inside her mouth, the utterance stuck in her vocal chords.
Frowning, she tried again, but strangled noises echoed instead of words. Her mind knew the answer, her body was ready to respond, but something was keeping them from executing the action. It should have been an automatic reaction. She knew her name, yet when she searched her mind for
