by Matt Wallace
A thunderous bursting and a renewed convulsing of the terrain draw her attention away from those defeatist thoughts and agonized sensations.
Dyeawan looks up, to the peak, to that smoking hollow wreathed in fiery light. The shaking of the mountain intensifies in that moment. However, Dyeawan no longer consciously feels it beneath her. The world seems to slow its pace and become eerily quiet. The constant rumbling in her ears ceases, and the whole of her consciousness is focused on that devil’s spout crowning the mountain.
The next sound Dyeawan registers is a deep bawling from inside the volcano as it erupts, spewing liquid fire what seems like a thousand feet in the air. Dyeawan has never before seen shades of red and orange so vibrant and alive and terrifying. The lava fills the sky above and begins raining in torrents down on the rocks directly above her position.
Dyeawan looks frantically over her shoulder, gazing down the path she’s crawled over. It is futile to attempt to make her way back down. Her eyes search the mountain’s face for some possible refuge she can take from the encroaching tidal wave of molten rock, but if such a thing even exists, which she is certain it does not, there is no such haven within a distance she could cover before the rolling fire engulfs her.
Dyeawan stares up at the radiant lava flowing down toward her, almost alive in its leech-like movements. The heat from the oncoming wave blisters the flesh of her face. She looks down and sees the skin atop her arms beginning to steam.
This is the part where you break down and cry and scream and wait for it all to be over, a voice inside her head casually informs Dyeawan.
The voice sounds less like her own and more like Edger’s.
He never knew her, not really, and the ghost of his memory knows her even less. The girl who would’ve sobbed in pain and fear and helplessness no longer exists. That is one of the reasons she chose to reclaim her name before taking her seat at the planners’ table; she knew the person who put on that gray tunic and concentric circle badge was a completely different one from the girl Edger and the Cadre scraped from the streets of the Bottoms.
You’ve come this far. There is nothing to do but see this foolish task to its conclusion. You have to attempt to solve the problem, wherever it leads.
That voice does belong to her, and it is who Dyeawan is now.
She relinquishes her left hand’s grip on its current hold, extending her arm forward and grasping the next rock that will grant her purchase. Every inch of her skin is now searing in agony, the pain threatening to shut down her mind while her muscles shriek at her to task them no more. She ignores it all, willing her thoughts to clarify, to push through the overwhelming sensations and allow her control over what parts of her body still obey her.
Dyeawan manages three more handholds before the lava rolls over her, and now, only now, does she unleash a savage, anguished cry. Her voice is extinguished as her very flesh is seared black and turned to instant tar. After that, the pain exists only inside her head, for scant slivers of moments that seem and feel like miniature eternities.
Strong hands grasp her by the arms, and in the next moment Dyeawan blinks eyelids she believed had just melted to find it all gone.
She is indeed lying upon the rocks of the mountain. Her cloth-wrapped hands are dirty and bloody from the climb. However, her skin is still more or less intact. There isn’t a burn mark upon her. She no longer feels pain beyond reckoning. She only feels tired and worn through and confused.
The lava has also disappeared. It is as if not a single drop has ever touched the stone surrounding her.
It is a calm, clear day. Barely a breeze disrupts the serenity.
She stares up into Tinker’s smiling face. From there she shifts her cloudy, disoriented gaze to the top of the peak. It is smoking as it did when she first noticed the black exhaust, in thin wisps muddled with gray.
“The smoke is real,” Tinker reassures her. “A few simple potions mixed in the appropriate quantities in the heart of the volcano, which lies forever dormant, as you read.”
Dyeawan’s breathing is still highly elevated, as is the pace of the blood rushing through her veins. She closes her eyes and forces her mind to focus, commanding her heartbeat to slow and the frantic fizzling between her ears to recede.
Tinker’s voice invades her self-imposed darkness. “It is remarkable what a few simple potions mixed in the proper proportions can do, isn’t it?”
Dyeawan opens her eyes, unclear as to why the old woman is reiterating that observation. She looks down to see a needle sticking in her right thigh. It is attached to a bellows, not unlike the one she used to inject Edger’s wind dragon, Ku, triggering the mating throes that killed her mentor.
“Don’t worry,” Tinker says. “It’s curative. It has restored you to your natural state.”
Dyeawan considers the needle and bellows in silence for a moment, waiting for her breathing to normalize.
“The soup,” she says.
Tinker nods, her smile broadening.
“But you ate it too,” Dyeawan puzzles, looking up at the old woman once more.
“I inoculated myself beforehand.”
Dyeawan reaches down and pulls the needle from her leg, holding it up to the light of the afternoon and scrutinizing it. “How did it make me see what you wanted me to see?”
“I wanted you to see nothing,” Tinker corrects her.
Dyeawan frowns. “You know what I mean.”
“The potion merely opened your mind to suggestion. Powerfully, of course. You already had volcanoes on the brain. I’m certain you studied them thoroughly. The smoke effect provided all the remaining suggestion you required.”
Dyeawan understands, though she is disappointed in her own weakness, regardless of what compounds they tricked her into swallowing. “But I did not reach the top.”
“That wasn’t the challenge.”
Dyeawan is confused again. “You said—”
“I told you an untruth, I’m afraid.”
Dyeawan loathes the way those long associated with the Planning Cadre seem unable or unwilling to call a lie what it is, especially when it is a lie perpetrated by them.
“This was never a race,” Tinker confirms. “Nor was it the contest of the body.”
“It was the contest of the will,” Dyeawan concludes.
The old woman seems pleased. “Correct.”
A steely calm fills Dyeawan’s weary body, soothing her fractured mind. There is anger, but it’s a dull feeling somewhere in the background. She quickly dismisses it as useless.
“And how did Nia fare?” she asks the former planner.
“She crawled into the fire. Much like you.”
Dyeawan is thoroughly unsurprised. “Of course she did.”
Tinker releases her hold and gently pries the needle and bellows from Dyeawan’s hand. “I’ve brought a litter. I’ll bear you back down the mountain. There’s a hidden trail not far from here.”
Again, Dyeawan is thoroughly unsurprised. “Of course there is,” she says.
HOSTAGE OF THE MIND
THERE IS NO ESCAPING THE thought for Lexi. She has been avoiding it since being released back into the world and the Gen Circus by her captors. She avoided it while picking up food in the Gen bazaar to restock the tower’s larders, something Lexi has done thousands of times before. She avoided it while walking, for the first time in weeks, through the doors of the tower in which she was born and raised and fell in love with her husband. She avoided it while tidying up the receiving room on the ground floor, where the most scrutinizing observer could find not a single hint that murdered bodies ever occupied the space.
That thought is the simple fact that the towers no longer feel like her home.
Lexi cannot locate what has changed within, much less around, her. She sits in the nook of her familiar parlor window, the one that faces its opposite in the sister tower where Brio grew up. She holds in her hands the reed-of-the-wind that Taru helped her repair after she bashed it over the sku
ll of her would-be assassin. Everything is the same—all the sights and sounds and smells that have surrounded her for the whole of her life.
Yet everything is different. All that is familiar is now completely unfamiliar, or at least it feels so.
Lexi wonders if she is merely seeing the entire world through different eyes now, with a gaze that has beheld so much horror and truth. She has delved too deeply beneath the veneer of Crache, perhaps deeper than anyone not conspiring to bring down the nation. Her head is filled with too many plots, too much knowledge of the dark ambitions and actions of others.
She wonders when, not if, the Protectorate Ministry will come for her, to question her, to abduct her, or even, finally, to kill her.
She wonders what Burr will do with her if Lexi lives long enough to accomplish the purpose the Ignoble has laid before her, by whatever delusional standard Burr will consider that purpose achieved.
She also constantly wonders about Taru. Is her retainer enjoying the same treatment Lexi did in another castle in the hidden lands of some other Ignoble, concealed for centuries from the bureaucracy of Crache? Is Taru rotting in a dark and dank dungeon somewhere? Are they even alive? Is Burr merely lying to Lexi, dangling the false hope of Taru’s safety and return in front of her to subdue and compel Lexi to commit ultimately heinous acts?
It all feels so futile, yet she cannot bring herself to refuse Burr’s demands. Lexi only knows her spirit can ill afford living with the knowledge another person she loves has been taken from her and will not return. After months of resisting the idea Brio was dead and finally learning he is alive, only for his current status to be totally unknown to her, Lexi is compelled to do whatever she has to in order to keep Taru, or at the very least the idea of them, alive and well in her mind.
Her body is weary from the long days spent in the Bottoms. She and Shaheen have developed a routine, a route they follow in their wagon filled with food donated from the allotments of Gens either sympathetic to Burr’s cause or secretly held under the woman’s conniving yoke. Those donations have doubled in their daily amount since this whole thing began. Lexi reckons there isn’t a poor soul left in the Bottoms who is not fed by their hands.
They worship her now. Lexi would like to delude herself into believing Burr’s plan has succeeded only in filling empty bellies and fortifying others in need. The truth, however, is that the people of the Bottoms idolize and revere Lexi. At this point, she could order them all to walk off the docks and drown in the sea and most of them would probably do it without question, so assured are they of Lexi’s kind nature, altruistic intentions, and genuine affection for them.
It is genuine, too. They are no longer some nameless, faceless, unwashed mass to her. Lexi no longer sympathizes with them as a vague collective, or idea of suffering. She knows them now, and empathizes with their plight. She knows their names and recognizes their faces and has learned their stories. She has come to love and trust them, and they her in return.
Yet with every scrap of food she hands out, Lexi also serves them the tale Burr has instructed her to dispense under threat of Taru’s death. Lexi spins the grand and glorious web of lies that paints ancient nobility as loving protectors and caretakers of their people. The seeds she planted in a few minds about how much better their lives would be if nobility were restored to rule have blossomed into a burgeoning belief system among the people of the Bottoms.
Lexi told herself she was agreeing to Burr’s terms and instructions to bide time. She needed that time to figure out how to subvert Burr’s goals for her while saving Taru’s life and hopefully her own. Yet she has no plan. She has no allies. She is shadowed every day by Kamen Lim, and is only the tool Burr intended to fashion her into.
Lexi rises from the window, wandering across the soft rug in her bare feet. She absently strums the reed, striking nothing resembling an actual chord. She curls her toes, staring down at them, at the lush threads of the rug protruding between them. Blood once stained those fibers, that of the men who came to kill her. Taru washed it out of the rug. Lexi offered to help, but her retainer refused, insisting to perform the gruesome task alone.
The smooth wood of the reed is cool against her fingers. She holds the beautiful instrument by its reconstructed neck, cradling its wooden belly as she turns it over and over in her hands.
Lexi stares down at the round table in the middle of the rug. There is a chain of bloody memories that lives in her mind, each link forged by the trauma of witnessing and creating violent death.
Upon the table, Lexi sees herself being held down by the Savage sent to kill her. That image warps into one of the other Savage, the lanky spear-wielding man, splayed open by Taru’s blade before being sprawled over the top of the same table right before Lexi’s eyes. There was so much blood; more than Lexi had ever seen at one time, much less pouring from one person’s body. The scrawny murderer’s eyes were wide and vacant, devoid of even the slightest spark of life, no longer looking as though they belonged inside a man.
That empty gaze is the next link in the chain of memories. Lexi recalls Daian’s eyes as the poison took hold of him. His eyes slowly fell into that same void. She remembers the surprise that preceded that blankness. Even for such a creature as Daian, an unrepentant killer, a madman, the realization of his own tenuous mortality was such a shock.
As was the notion that Lexi killed him, she supposes.
It’s not so much living with that knowledge as it is the truth within her. Lexi wanted to kill Daian. The plan she affected in her prison quarters within Burr’s castle was not one of escape, but of murder. Escaping was only a pretense. Lexi knew even with Daian’s help, even if he had provided her all the knowledge of their location and the surrounding terrain and the secrets of Burr’s blood garden, she had no chance of succeeding in her proposed flight.
She simply wanted to kill him. She was tired of being their victim, and she hated what Daian was, and what he’d done.
Lexi strangles the neck of the reed with both of her hands. She raises the cherished memento high above her head and smashes it against the edge of the table. The seams where its broken parts have been mended separate as the body of the instrument shatters. She is left holding a neck connected to nothing.
And yes, there is impulsive fury in what she’s just done, but there is also a conscious thought, and that is the reed should be broken into a hundred pieces. Repairing it was wrong. The stringed instrument represents a time that is not only gone, but was destroyed by loss and malice and violence and death.
Lexi casts the neck of the reed away and drops to her knees. Her tears come in torrents, racking her body. She doubles over, clutching at the fibers of the rug.
That is how Shaheen finds Lexi, on her hands and knees sobbing her pain and frustration into that antique rug, seeing through tear-filled eyes blood stains that are no longer present among its threads.
“Te-Gen!” the girl cries in alarm, rushing to Lexi’s side.
“I’m all right, Shaheen,” Lexi assures her, roughly choking back as much sorrow as spittle. “I’m all right.”
Shaheen lightly grips Lexi’s upper arm for support, rubbing the area between her shoulder blades with the other hand.
“What happened?”
Lexi doesn’t know how to begin to answer. She rises to her knees with Shaheen’s help, sitting against the heels of her bare feet. Her hands cup her face as she inhales and exhales deeply, cleansing herself of the sudden fit.
“I… I slipped,” she finally manages to say, lowering her hands.
Shaheen is quiet, and it’s clear from her expression she doesn’t believe Lexi. “It’s not,” Shaheen stammers. “I shouldn’t pry. It’s not my place.”
The girl begins to stand, but Lexi instinctively reaches out and grasps her wrist, halting her. “No,” Lexi says. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”
Shaheen nods, kneeling in front of her.
“What can I do?” she asks. “What is wrong?”
&nbs
p; “I don’t know what you can do,” Lexi answers honestly. “I… I’m just…”
The tears begin spilling over her cheeks anew. She feels herself losing her grip once more.
“I’m alone,” Lexi says, the admission hurling her back into the abyss. “I’m all alone. I thought… I thought I could do this, that I could show them I was stronger… but I can’t. I have no one.”
Shaheen reaches out and embraces Lexi, pulling her close.
Lexi allows herself to be held, encircling the smaller girl with her arms. Soon she’s clinging to Shaheen, sobbing into the crook of her neck.
“You’re not alone,” Shaheen whispers in her ear. “You have me. You helped me once. Let me help you.”
Lexi is already shaking her head, smearing her tears across the girl’s shoulder. “You can’t. Not with this. You don’t understand—”
“Lexi,” the girl bids her gently.
“No, Shaheen, you can’t know what’s really happening—”
“Lexi,” she repeats, loudly, and in a completely different tone.
It is so jarring that Lexi actually pulls away from her, startled.
Shaheen’s hands grip Lexi’s forearms, stopping her short. The girl’s hands are strong, surprising Lexi again. They feel as firm as vises encircling her flesh.
She stares into her ward’s eyes. Shaheen’s expression has also changed. Lexi sees nothing of the timid street urchin, a mother too soon seeking the Gen leader’s approval constantly. The young woman meeting her gaze is filled with confidence. The confusion that filled her eyes a moment before has been replaced by knowing certainty.
“You have help, Lexi,” Shaheen insists. “All you’ve ever had to do was ask for it.”
Lexi doesn’t know what to say. She’s completely at a loss to understand the abrupt change in the girl.
