“How about when I’m not in my cloak, you can just call me Talia,” she said. “And you can stop poking yourself in the eye with things.”
“All right… Talia.” The girl tried the name, and wrinkled her nose.
“How about Tal? Your mom calls me that sometimes,” she said.
“Is she back?” The girl’s face opened. So like her mother. While Talia could feel her own face closing, an erratic pulse growing in the corner of her jaw.
“Not yet. But soon, I bet. I saw some of the other greyes in the market earlier.” Dripping with something, afraid of being touched.
“Speaking of which…” She wiggled her pack in Seild’s direction. It was a ploy, and not a clever one, and she felt only a slight ping when Seild fell for it.
“You went to the market?”
“Oh? And why would someone such as yourself care about the market?”
A sudden shyness overtook the girl, who suddenly found a new interest in her feet. It didn’t last; the smell of saltpetals was unmistakable as Talia pulled the bag from her pack. And remembered that she’d never replaced it. Skist. All she had were the crushed remnants. So much for her distraction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They’re all crushed.”
“That’s all right,” the girl said. “Mom crushes them all the time. Watch.”
With practiced ease, Seild opened the bag with one hand, licked her finger, and then stuck her entire hand deep into the crumbs. “See? Khee can even eat them that way. Here, Khee!”
Khee shot Talia a glance, then stuck out the smallest portion of his tongues that he possibly could and allowed Seild to daintily press some of the crumbs to it. He rolled his tongues back into his mouth, said
no
so sharply that this time Talia did laugh. He sat on his rump, the edges of his wide mouth curled down, snorting out of his nose. Seild, who was busy sticking three wet and crumb-covered fingers in her mouth, didn’t seem to care, or notice, that the beast didn’t share her love of the treat.
“Please don’t eat all of those in the next five minutes?” A useless plea but she had to make it. “I brought you something too, Khee.” She tossed him the biggest piece of the jerky, which he caught, swallowed, and thanked her for in a single gesture of tooth and jaw.
“Ganeth? I’m coming in.”
She waited for his answer before moving. Only once had she entered his workshop before he’d responded, and somehow she’d triggered something and a bunch of winged barbs had come flying at her face. Ganeth had called them off by blowing a weird scent out of a metal flower, but not before she’d felt their points whirring past her mouth, as if trying to find a way in.
“Come!” he said.
The door to Ganeth’s workshop was made of sticky gel that you had to push your way through. She would have preferred to use her hex hand so she didn’t have to touch it, but Ganeth wasn’t sure it wouldn’t gum up the electronics somehow. Her clothed elbow took the brunt of the push, but even then, she couldn’t get through without it touching her skin. It wasn’t squeamishness; she’d stuck her hands into lots of things, not the least of which was whatever was in the door that led to the clave. It was that the slick slide of it made her think of the vordcha, the rubbery squeal of their skin as they’d moved around her body. She could almost smell the chemical and copper of their devices melting into her blood.
She was sure if she told Ganeth, he’d replace the door with something else. But each time she tried to convince herself that it would get better. It didn’t.
She didn’t know what she expected to find, but it wasn’t this. It was just Ganeth, his face planted behind a domed device. Not that seeing his face behind a device was that unusual. In fact, she probably saw him like that more often than any other way. But the fact that he was alone and there was no sign of Ardit and Rakdel deepened her confusion, and added to her growing sense of dread.
“Talia,” Ganeth said, as she entered the room and shuddered off the feel of the gel. Ganeth’s voice was warm, but he didn’t look up. He did something and the dome on the device became translucent, so she could see his face through it, but the nature of it somehow showed his eyes as being much too large for his head. The effect was disconcerting, particularly when he was talking. “It’s safe. I just need a few… moments… to…”
She knew better than to try to talk to him when he was focused. He’d do his best to respond, but it would end up being mostly nonsense. Words coming out of his mouth that had nothing to do with whatever was happening in his brain.
She watched him work instead. Ganeth was tall and broad, big all over, the kind of man you thought you’d be glad to have on your side in a fight. And while that was true enough, it wasn’t for the reasons one would expect. He was, in fact, an utter abomination with a sword. Or an axe. Or, really, a blade or bow or weapon of any kind.
She’d been at the bookstore while Omuf-Rhi tried to give him a lesson once – and had suffered the consequences of that choice. Not only did Ganeth hate weapons, he wielded them as if he was throwing a live snake across the room. He’d nearly taken Talia’s other arm off with a particularly errant swipe of his blade. While he’d been talking too vehemently with his hands, she was often quick to remind him. Not while he was actually trying to hit something.
What Ganeth was brilliant with were his devices. He didn’t use them to fight – she thought he might be against fighting as part of his priesthood or something – but she was pretty sure that he could, and even would, if given the right incentive. If she was ever at war – a place she truly hoped to not be any time in the near future – he was the nonfighter she wanted at her side.
“Ganeth,” she asked, unable to wait anymore. “I saw Ardit and Rakdel in the market. They’ve come back.”
She waited to see what he said. Would he pretend he hadn’t also seen them?
He blinked behind the device. One eye went bigger than the other. “They were early.”
“They were… covered in something. Green. Moving…” She glanced over her shoulder at the door, making sure that Seild was still busy with her petals. “Like it was alive.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice slightly muffled by the device – she had no idea what he was doing back there. “I saw that.”
She watched his eye grow smaller and bigger behind the device. He often said things that made no sense to her. Sometimes she could figure them out if she thought about it, but this one wasn’t coming to her. She wondered if all Aeon Priests were like this, or just Ganeth. “You saw it? At the market?”
“No.” Ganeth pulled himself from behind the device. His eyes were back to their normal size as he looked at her. “They were here. But I saw them earlier in the remote viewer. With the green… I thought it was venom, but now I am pretty sure it’s a thinking acid of some kind. Sentient, not sapient.” He tapped his eye, and then the device. Neither gesture meant anything to her.
She waited, shaking her head slightly.
“Ah,” he said. “It might be easier to show you. Would you like to try it?”
“Not if it’s going to make my eyes look like that.”
“Your what look like what?” He shook his head. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. You can see what I saw and it will make sense. Come around the back. Stand where I was standing and put your eyes to the blank spaces in the back.”
She did so, but had to crouch down a bit in order to make her eyes level with the places he pointed out. Inside the device, against a background of metal and synth, she could see a scene. At first, it was blurry and hard to make out – a couple of figures, a bunch of dark shapes that looked like trees or mountains.
“Ganeth, what…?”
And then the scene adjusted. Tightened and became whole, as if her eyes had just started working correctly. She could see Isera, impossibly, as if she was standing just in front of her. She wielded a giant maul, the end of which was alight with green flames that sputtered and sparked with every swing.
&n
bsp; In front of her, a giant yellow, pus-filled worm with several long necks opened its skin, and from a hundred, a thousand sudden mouths, spewed forth a liquid that drenched Isera’s flame in seconds. Talia was sure it was the same liquid she’d seen on Ardit’s blade in the marketplace.
Beside Isera, a greyes that she thought was Sarir – it was hard to tell through the helmet – was hacking at one of the creature’s necks with a long sword. The neck opened under the blade, sending forth more of its insides, a liquid that seemed so hot it was boiling. Sarir fell to her knees, her mouth open. Although Talia couldn’t hear her, she was sure the woman was howling.
Isera sidestepped, but barely – she was limping, dragging her left foot. One whole side of her face was covered in roiling green, and she had that eye closed, cocking her head in what seemed like an effort to give herself a better view of the creature.
Slowly, she raised one hand. Even through the device, Talia could see the cypher she wore on the inside of her palm. It pulsed out a white beam that opened up around the worm, capturing it in a ring of light. But it was clear that it wouldn’t last long – already the creature’s pus was eating through the material.
Talia couldn’t stand to watch anymore. She pushed herself from the device. Her eyes felt scratchy and swollen. “Where are they, Ganeth? They’re going to die. We have to help them.”
“They’re fine,” he said. He had turned his attention to a large metal container and was poking at something inside it with a buzzing synthsteel rod. “I just looked them over.”
It took her a moment to get his meaning. “Not Ardit and Rakdel. Isera. The others.”
“Oh. They’re fine, too. I already watched to the end.”
She wanted to take the rod out of his hand and force him to give her his full attention, to answer all of her questions. Right. Now.
Instead, she said, “Explain.” Then, remembering some of his past explanations, she added, “Explain it for me.”
“It’s not real,” he said. “Or, rather, it is real. But it already happened.”
“How? When?”
“I’m not sure… it’s a recording, from the past.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. Everything was blurred. Here was one place she thought she’d get answers and now she had too many answers and not enough questions. “How?”
“Well, there are these tiny particles in the air, everywhere around us, that we can’t really see, called nano–”
“No,” she said. His words weren’t helping. She didn’t know what he was talking about. She had to go to Isera. She had to do something. Maybe Ganeth was wrong. Maybe this wasn’t the past. Maybe it was like what her visions were supposed to be. Maybe it hadn’t happened yet and she could stop it.
“Those are the charn, aren’t they?”
That did get his attention, for he carefully set the buzzing rod down and lifted his face. “What makes you think that?”
His expression was rarely readable, but now she could see confusion and uncertainty in it. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t heard or read the word before. Maybe it was taboo, unspoken. Fears often were. “Aren’t they?”
She was startled to hear him laugh, a sudden acrid sound that made her cheeks burn. “Those? No. No. They’re… I don’t know. Some type of worm, I imagine. Sure, they look dangerous. Well, they are dangerous. But nothing out of the ordinary. Just the type of thing that you and the greyes are positioned to protect us from. It’s why all of this, all of you, exist.”
Ganeth wasn’t always the quickest to catch on to emotions, but he must have seen something in her face, because he quickly added, “I promise. I’ve watched the whole thing. They’re fine. A few scratches, nothing out of the ordinary. They’ll be on their way home soon.”
“Do you promise me that they are not dead? Dying?” She couldn’t get the tense right. It had happened, but was still happening, or maybe hadn’t happened yet.
“They’re not dead.” He built a steeple from the entwine of his fingers. “I promise on the Sacred Chronicle of High Father Calaval.”
She didn’t know what that was, and she couldn’t tell if she wanted the answer enough to ask twice. She couldn’t shake that image of Isera, half blind. That creature. Its thousand mouths. Why hadn’t she seen that in the poisoning?
The answer came as fast as the question: because she was a fraud. False.
“I want… I need… to watch the whole thing,” she said.
He did something with the device, then nodded. She leaned in, pressed her eyes to the scene. She watched it all. Every swing and ache and grimace of pain. Every fall back and push forward. She watched every moment of her lie play out before her until she couldn’t stand it anymore. And then she ran.
THE MARROW
Khee came with her. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t even stop to say anything to Seild on her way out of Ganeth’s door. But as she made her way across the city, she realized she could hear the mechbeast breathing beside her, keeping pace. In this latelight, his stripes looked paler than normal, almost cream colored. Like he was half shadow, half real.
At first, she didn’t know why her feet took her to the Break. There were so other many places to run. To the tunnels. Out the front gate. Even back to her room. But none of them felt right. It wasn’t until she stopped against the broken section of the wall that she realized what had drawn her. Here was the tiny hollow in the stones where she and Khee had lived when they’d first come to Enthait.
She knelt down to look into the darkness of it. It had seemed small then, but now she could see how small it really was. Not even a cave or a tunnel. Just a hollowed-out space big enough for two scrawny refugees.
“Remember this, Khee?” she asked.
yes
The sound was tinged with sadness, and some fear. She wasn’t surprised. The last time they’d stayed here had been bad. It was only a few weeks after she’d met Isera on the Green Road. Things had started to change after that. A little. Khee finally, finally gained some weight and began to explore the area around their hollow in the wall. Isera invited her to this ritual called taf, a kind of prayer combined with an herbed tea that grew colder as you drank it, until it was iced enough to sweat the glass in her hand. Talia had grown their stack of spoils for the leaving – shins, meat, a few containers, clothing, even a small square box that was supposed to explode if you threw it – into something that almost felt ready.
That last night here, she’d woken in the dark to a rare storm in the desert, the first one she’d seen since the snow at the blackweave. This one was not white, but black and blue. A crumbling thunder that roared through their hollowed cave as if to split it open, a blue light that rode down to the ground on thin, crackling legs and pushed the shadows back so that she could see the tightened pupils of Khee’s eyes each time.
It wasn’t the storm that had woken her. It was something else. Something was wrong.
It only took her moving awake to feel it. The top of her thigh thrummed so hard, the skin pulled so tight over whatever was festering in there, she thought it might split open. She put her hand to it, thinking to hold it all together with the press of finger and palm. The first touch made her voice echo the storm’s scream.
Khee pushed into her back, a question without words.
“I’m all right.” Her words through clenched teeth and spit couldn’t have been reassuring. Onas she was not. She forced an inhale, then more words. “I’m all right.”
Again. This time, gentler. Beneath the curious and careful press of her fingers, she could feel the heat, the foul press of skin. It was where she’d cut Khee’s horn off. The wound she thought had healed – the skin had healed, but something inside had not.
She tried to roll up her pant leg, then to pull it up, found both impossible with the crush of pain and the single hand. She needed a knife, something sharp. She fumbled through her packed stuff, stunned to realize that in all her planning she had not thought to steal a weapon, that there was nothin
g there to cut the fabric.
“Can you rip it, Khee?” she asked.
hurt
“Yes,” she said. As if he was waiting for something. “I’ll scream.”
yes
He too knew something of pain and waiting, for he slipped from behind her and dipped his head before any answer of hers could come. She heard, but didn’t feel the clamp of his teeth over the fabric. Her thigh throbbed, thrummed, hot and then cold. Some of Khee’s exhale, some of it her. He had a grip, but didn’t move.
“Khee, what–?”
The crack of thunder drowned out her question, and in it, the scream that followed when Khee clamped down and pulled the fabric to the side. Everything jerked to the side, a pain that started at the wound and branched so hard that her toes curled and the side of her jaw throbbed.
The fabric tore, thank the gods it tore the first time, because she didn’t think she could have done that again. She thought she would have fought Khee if he’d tried.
The words for thank you got tangled in her head, wouldn’t make the passage to her mouth. The best she could do was to drop her head and pant gratefully against Khee’s fur for a moment.
She twisted back to pull the fabric open between her fingers so she could see the wound in the next lightning strike and pain filled her head and the world was slipping into something black and grey and she heard the thunder again overhead, but the lightning never, ever came to split the dark.
How long later, she came awake on something less hard than rock floor, warmed by something both above and below. She flinched against the possibility of pain or noise or light, even before she remembered why. None came. Just the soft pale light that she’d come to associate with glowglobes and the sound of something moving around near her feet.
Not something. Someone. A thin figure in a brown apron. She watched through slitted eyes, calculated. Real? Not real? She vaguely remembered the acute thrum of her thigh, which was so absent now it almost created a space where it was missing. This was some kind of fever dream, she decided. She was still in the hollow of the wall, still festering, still dying.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 10
