Not harm. Lies.
As if they were not the same thing.
Standing there, she wanted more than anything to tell Isera the truth. All the truths. That she wasn’t the poison eater. That she wasn’t just some traveler, exploring the world, as she’d told her. That she had sliced off her own arm and cut out pieces of her own skull, in the midst of fire and snow and pain, to free herself from a danger she barely had a name for. That she was a fugitive, a killer, an unspeakable beast that had done unspeakable things.
The words sprouted on her tongue, and then withered before she could give them life. Rather than putting words into the air, she took Isera’s skin into her mouth. The soft curve of her lip, the coil of her earlobe. She took in as much of Isera as she could, until she could tell herself she was full. Isera met her, sighing.
Talia was the first to pull away.
“Moon meld you tomorrow, Greyes Isera.” Talia was aiming for humor, but it fell short, landed on serious and scared instead. She felt a stab of panic, a thin slice to the edge of her breath. What was she sending her to?
But of course, there was nothing. She’d made the dangers up, just as she’d made up every threat before this. They would find nothing, as they always did, and assume the threat had moved on or met some other untimely end. Isera would be safe. All of the zaffre would.
But you won’t. Because eventually, someone will see through you. Through your lies. Burrin, she thought. Because he was looking. Or Isera, because she was not.
“I’ll look in on Seild if you’d like,” Talia said.
“She would like that.” Not the same thing, but enough for now.
The two of them touched fingers, one of the few things that Talia had brought with her from her sisters. They stood that way for a long moment before Talia slipped out into the night, pulling the marked door closed tight behind her.
* * *
Sometimes the city sang. No. Sang wasn’t the right word. The city’s sound wasn’t one of mouth or lungs, throat or tongue. It was stormvoice – thunder crack and cloud breath and the patter of red rain across a bloodied blade. A beautiful and terrible chorus that made Talia’s bones ache in response.
Most days, Enthait sounded like any other city – the call of animals and people, the passage of wind across the walls, the snap of banners and the turn of wheels. But when it despaired, when it hungered, when the winds swirled around it in fear and dismay, the city sang.
People had told her she’d get so that she’d hardly hear it – and it was clear that most of them had long ago reached that stage – but for her that day had not yet come. She wasn’t sure it ever would; perhaps it was a result of coming here so late in life, while most others had grown up inside these walls, surrounded by this song of sorrow and steel.
The greyes – Burrin, Isera, the others – had been gone five days and the city was singing fiercely. The sound threaded through Talia as soon as she stepped out of the tunnels onto the Green Road. She staggered into the crowd, more startled by the singing than by the sight, barking her shoulder against a nearby pillar. It took her a moment to right herself again, to figure out where she was in the hustle and bustle of noise and light. The city’s chorus had blurred her vision into tears, and she blinked them away in time to its steel-slick pulsebeat.
She hadn’t meant to emerge from the tunnels here, into the push of song and sound, but she also wasn’t that surprised. Every time she took a correct turn through the tunnels, she took an equally incorrect one. If it wasn’t for the sense of secrecy they offered her, she’d be tempted to leave the tangle of their angled passages behind for good.
She’d been aiming for the Eternal Market – it was the best place to hear news of the city and she’d been hoping to learn more of the zaffre, the charn. She was on the exact opposite side of the Green Road.
The weather was surprisingly cool and windy, a rare break from the desertlike weather, and Talia was half-hidden in tan pants and a worn-down coat. A dark blue scarf around her neck, her long braids wrapped up inside a second, darker scarf. It wasn’t likely that she’d be recognized, so it couldn’t hurt to walk along the Green Road to get to the market. It had to be better than trying her luck again in the tunnels.
Even though it went nowhere but back to itself, the Green Road was always busy. Like so many things here, road wasn’t the right word, as she’d eventually discovered. It looked like a wide strip of translucent green material. As far as Talia could tell, it ran a perfect circle around the clave, making it a common meeting place.
Talia had spent a lot of time here when she and Khee first arrived in the city. Then, she hadn’t known what the poison eater was. She barely knew the name of the city. She and Khee weren’t planning to stay any longer than the time it took them to heal, lie low, and find or steal enough food and supplies to keep running.
Running where? She didn’t know. Somewhere very far. She didn’t have a grasp of how big the world was, but in the stories she’d retold for her sisters, they’d come from lands of red ash, ice walls, forests so vast and thick you might never find your way out. Maeryl’s blue-silver sea-city called Qi. Even Talia’s own small village buried deep in the mountains of the Black Riage. It seemed the vordcha could go anywhere, would go anywhere, to find what they were looking for.
Talia had wanted badly to believe that she and Khee were not what the vordcha were looking for. That the vordcha had forgotten about them. But she knew that wasn’t true. The vordcha were surely hunting them. Not for revenge. That was far too… human. But for property. They had owned her. Thought they owned her still.
She’d cut off her arm, sliced out bits of her scalp, released Khee from his horns – every way she could think of that the vordcha might use to track them – and still she wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t come. Weren’t already coming. They were relentless and smart. They would find a way. So the goal was: heal, gather supplies, run until they could no longer run.
And then she’d met a woman with mismatched eyes on the Green Road and everything had gone upside down.
She’d come to find food. Steal food, to be true. She’d found the market less than ideal – too crowded and full of things for the taking, so people were on their guard. Even the best of thieves had a hard time there, and with only her left hand, she wasn’t sure picking pockets would ever become a bragging skill. She missed her right hand, even as much as she’d hated all the mech inside it. Her hair had started to grow back, at least, although the bright streaks of red along her scars were taking some getting used to. She had them covered with an elaborately stitched grey hood she’d borrowed from a passerby.
The Green Road was better, easier. She mostly didn’t steal for herself – but Khee, Khee was starving. So hollowed she could see the curves of his teeth inside his closed jaws. He was better – sleeping less fitfully in the tiny place she’d found for them in the wall near the run-down part of town. But he was still too weak to hunt – not that she’d seen much in the way of prey in the city. So she was hunting for him. It was the least she could do. She didn’t remember much about their passage from the blackweave to the city, but she was pretty sure Khee was the only reason she’d made it here. Although how he might have done that in his state was something she didn’t know. Perhaps when he was healed, he would tell her. She didn’t think it likely, though.
She’d stood still, upon the road, letting the throngs pass her, brush her, jostle against her. A predator hidden in plain sight. Man, child, family, two men in blue and bronze uniforms looking stern and official. She rejected them all. She wasn’t swift or clean, a clumsy one-handed fumbling with packages or wrappings. Her best prey were those not paying attention.
Two young women walked by, talking excitedly with their hands, giggling together, several bags over their shoulders. One was pulling a mechanical floating box on a long string. It was piled high with packages and folded bits of fabric. Clothing, mostly. Not that she couldn’t use something to wear that wasn’t stained and brok
en. But that wasn’t what she needed.
One of the packages caught her eye; it was wrapped in yellow paper inside a clear synth bag. The paper was dotted with reddish pools. Meat. It was even near the top of the pile. And on her left side. Clearly, whatever gods lived in Enthait – was this a god-filled place? She didn’t know – were guiding her hand today.
Swiftly, she slid past the women, plucking the package from the box in a single, nonchalant sweep of her arm. Without looking back, she continued on her way. If they noticed, they would come after her whether she stopped or not. It took her half a second to tuck the package into her empty sleeve, where she’d rigged a holder of sorts. She nearly smiled at the weight of it. It had been two days since she’d brought something back for Khee. This one, this one was good. Fresh. Heavy. I’m coming, Khee.
The woman in front of her appeared so swiftly that Talia barely had time to react. She put both hands out, realized her mistake too late, and dropped her right arm to her side. The package inside her sleeve shifted and bulged. She barely breathed, expecting it to fall to the ground between them, but the straps she’d rigged up held and caught.
“Sehwa,” the woman said. A word Talia didn’t know, but she guessed from the woman’s tone that it was an apology of sorts. Mostly, the language here was one she was familiar with, even if the accent was slanted to her ears. But it was sprinkled throughout with words and phrases that sounded like gibberish, soft-voweled things that fell off her tongue at odd angles when she tried them and gave her away as an outsider. “I thought you were someone… else.”
The woman was wearing a blue and bronze uniform – the same as the men who’d passed her earlier. Her short hair was the same blue as her clothing, standing up in small, crafted points all over her head. In the middle of her forehead, a silver spiral was painted upon her skin. Talia would have found herself mesmerized by it, but for the eyes beneath it. Mismatched. Grey and brown. Staring at her intently.
Or rather at her stolen hood.
Talia could have ducked her head, bowed, did whatever people did here to show reverence or apology. But some instinct told her this woman would not be swayed by her attempt at being demure.
Talia lifted her face fully. She knew everything this gave away; she’d seen her reflection in a glass-faced building just this morning. The bruises and cuts still half-healed across her cheeks. The broken lip that occasionally opened and bled for no reason. The single puncture at the front of her neck, festering still, pulling tight in protest at her movement.
Despite that, despite it all, she met the woman’s gaze with as much strength as she could bring to bear. “Perhaps I am someone else.”
A moment of stillness and then. Reward. One tiny corner of the woman’s lips lifted. She might never again wield the swiftest blade or have the fastest of fingers, but words were weapons that never failed.
“That may be,” the woman said. “But you are not the someone else I thought you were.”
“No?” People crowded by them, but not as close as before. They opened up and made room for the woman in the blue and bronze. And, by the same motion, for Talia, too.
The woman continued to regard her, long enough that Talia’s heart beat three, four times in her chest. Slow, thick thumps against her breastbone in time to her breath.
“No,” the woman said. “I’m quite sure that person does not have a stolen bit of meat for an arm.”
Talia blinked in surprise. If she’d seen malice, even aggression, in the woman’s face, she would have run. Bolted back toward Khee. A race that she surely would have lost, not yet knowing the city, not yet having her body back.
If she’d seen authority there, she would have lied her way out of the conversation. She’d done it with a shopkeeper in the market just a few days ago. He’d thought she’d taken a bit of fruit. She had, by way of distraction, convinced him she hadn’t. In truth, she actually hadn’t – but a substantial bit of jerky did seem to find its way into her pocket while they were talking about fruit. Certainly something she could do again.
But in those mismatched eyes, what she saw was a curiosity. That, more than anything, made her fold her forthcoming lie up and slip it back into her pocket for safekeeping. There’d be another time to use it, she was sure.
“It’s for another,” Talia said simply, hoping that would be enough.
The woman blinked, hard, twice. There was a sound like wings between them. The pupil in her grey eye tightened into nothing, a pinpoint of black, and then disappeared, leaving a solid steel-colored orb.
“Does that person look as unwell as you?”
The woman ran her odd gaze across Talia’s face as she answered, “Not a person, but yes.” Talia considered. “No, worse.”
The woman blinked again, and a second later, both pupils were back to being the same size. She tilted her head to the side, touching two fingers lightly to the side of her eye as if it pained her.
“Why are you telling me the truth?” she asked.
The package in Talia’s sleeve seemed like it was growing heavier, tugging her down. “Why are you believing me?”
“It’s part of my job,” the woman said. “To see true.”
Talia didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t want to show her ignorance by asking. There was something about this woman that made her want to know everything, to have all the answers and spread them out before her, like a hand of perfect cards.
“I thought you were a…” Talia looked for the word. “Guard, of sorts.”
The other woman had lifted her eyebrow at that. She had a crooked smile that brought one side of her mouth higher than the other, and created a deep dimple in one cheek. Talia tried to keep her mind on the conversation.
“I suppose I am,” the woman said. “A guard, of sorts.”
She put both thumbs to her eyes – it was a gesture Talia had seen others give to each other, but until that moment, none had given it to her.
“Greyes Isera, zaffre, in the service of Enthait, the orness, and the poison eater.”
It was clear the woman – Greyes Isera – was waiting for her to respond in kind but Talia’s mouth seemed to be something she no longer owned. She knew she was no longer Cathaliaste, no longer martyr to the vordcha. But who was she? She had started thinking of herself as Talia somewhere between the blackweave and Enthait, but she didn’t think she had ever said the name aloud. Maybe to Khee, maybe in the snow and ice and shatter. She had a vague memory of such a thing.
What does it matter? Soon, you will be elsewhere and no one will remember the name you gave to another today.
“Talia,” she said, despite everything that told her not to. “I’m Talia.”
“Talia.” Isera’s accent stretched the name longwise, gave it weight that it hadn’t before. That corner of her mouth curled up. “You aren’t from here, are you?”
“Are you going to do that eye thing again if I answer you?” She looped a hand in the air, made it smaller on the second circle, mimicking as best she could the way the pupil had shrunk in on itself.
Isera laughed at that – loud and true, a sound that rose up into the air on tiny wings and, oh, for the first time since she’d run and fallen, for one tiny moment since she’d buried her friends beneath the bloodied snow, Talia felt something real. It washed over her, hot and white and full of pain. She staggered, her knees buckling forward. She caught herself before she fell, but it was an ungainly move that showed the stiff pain of her body.
Isera had reached to catch Talia’s stumble, then clearly thought better of it, for the arm she would have taken hold of was no arm at all.
“That question was for duty,” she said. “This one is for pleasure.”
“Then no.” Talia considered a moment. “Was it my accent?”
“No.” The woman waved a hand covered in blue rings, but didn’t elucidate further. “But I can tell you’ve been on the Green Road, based on your… skills.”
There was a pause.
Talia
chose not to fill it.
“Have you seen the gardens?” The same hand pointed downward, toward the wide green swatch of road. Talia followed it and saw nothing more than what she always saw – stippled green glass, reflecting light in an unusual way. Enthait was full of materials she’d never seen before, many of them far weirder than that. And it was certainly no garden, unless that word had a different meaning than the one she knew.
“Look again,” she said, as if she could tell what Talia was thinking. “You’ll see it.”
Talia didn’t – and then she did. She was looking through the glass, down. And down. There was nothing directly beneath her feet except for the glass she stood upon. Far, far below, she was looking at what looked like the tops of trees. A tiny shape that absolutely could not be a person, so far down she could barely see them, moved across what could absolutely not be a long, long ladder.
All this time standing here, walking here, stealing here, and she hadn’t noticed the long fall beneath her feet, the steep sides that slipped down and down. It was as if someone had shifted an optical illusion, and now she couldn’t unsee it, the vast distance between her and the ground.
She was aware of the pounding of her heart, the loss of breath that made her face feel hot and swollen. She needed to get off this road, and quickly. It was impossible to believe she would not fall. But she was hemmed in by crowds that flowed around her, packages and pets and people. There was nowhere to go.
Only Isera stood, not moving. This time, she did take Talia’s arm. Through the fabric, she felt the pressure of her fingers, solid, strong, holding her steady.
Isera whispered a word, soft vowels that slipped through her without staying, without casting understanding, but that seemed to urge her to breathe. Talia did so, deep and full, then looked down, in the space between her boots and Isera’s.
Green everywhere. Not the surface of the road – in fact, she thought that was translucent, completely clear. But far, far below, a layer of green. She thought the whole thing went as far down as the skars went up, perhaps farther.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 7
