A hand on her forehead, a human hand, a real hand. She pulled back so hard and sudden she heard her head smack off the firm surface beneath her. It took half a second for the pain that equaled the sound to show itself, sharp. At the same time, the wound in her thigh seemed to realize she was awake, and joined her, humming a high song of pain.
The hand went away.
“How are you feeling?” The voice was honeyed and soft, from far away.
She wanted to answer that voice, it sounded so nice. But she couldn’t. There was nothing in her that didn’t hurt and wasn’t scared.
The voice went on as if it hadn’t expected an answer. A second later, she realized it wasn’t talking to her. There was someone else in the room. That someone else was answering.
“Like I got bit by a giant craqar beast with a million teeth.”
“Seems about right.”
Laughter, loud enough that it pulled her fully from the bad place. She opened her eyes. Beyond her feet, which were bare, two people were talking. Or, rather, one person – the thin one in the brown apron – and one something else. Big. Humanish. Covered in reddish-orange hair all over.
They both approached as she tried to sit up.
“How about not yet?” the aproned one said.
“How about yet.” Talia tried to say it with a certain fervor and strength. It came out a jumbled mess of spit.
The laughter again.
“Stop,” she tried. Better. An actual word.
“Sorry,” the aproned one said. “I had to give you something for the pain. It’s probably making you a little dizzy.”
She sat part way up anyway, and the movement of the room made her want to vomit. She stayed it by closing her eyes for a moment. When it had eased enough that she thought it past, she pushed herself up with her left hand until she was nearly sitting fully, then slowly, slowly laid back down.
Everything about the woman was thin except her cheekbones, which curved out of her face like the sides of a bowl. She wore a bright purple wrap around her head that brought warmth to her russet eyes. “Greyes Rakdel, chiurgeon and–”
“The best chiurgeon in the whole of Enthait.” Spoken with such affection that the woman laughed, her cheeks dimpling. The one who’d spoken was tall and wide, and moved like someone carrying a lot more muscle than fat. He had six eyes, two of which regarded her carefully, while the other four, smaller and higher up on his head, seemed to be looking at the woman.
“Yes, thank you, Omuf-Rhi.” She touched his arm in passing, a familiar gesture. She’s done that a thousand times, Talia thought. More. “As I was saying…”
Her brain caught up to her in a sudden rush. How did she get here? What had happened to her leg? Where was–
“Where’s Khee? Where’s…” What did one call him to strangers? She realized she had no idea what kind of creature he truly was. “The creature I was with. Brownish. Big–”
“Teeth?” the man said. “Really, really big teeth?”
She nodded.
“He’s fine. I can’t say as much for myself.” He held up his arm, which was wrapped in red strips, around and around. The fur near it was matted with something dark. “I don’t know what you did for that creature, but he’s the most loyal thing I’ve ever seen. I had to pretty much let him clamp on to my arm just so I could drag you here.”
Khee, you fought for me?
“I’m sorry about your arm,” she said. It sounded so small, but it was all she had to offer.
He waved her apology away, but not impolitely. “I understand protecting the ones you love. We worked it out, your beast and I. I promised to try to save you, and he promised not to kill me. Well, he didn’t actually promise. More just loosened his grip a little.”
The two exchanged glances. Rakdel reached forward, gestured with a long, flat tool toward Talia’s thigh. “May I?”
Talia hesitated, then nodded. The press of the metal was cold, but surprisingly not painful. She didn’t know if that was because she was healing better there or because of the drugs Rakdel had given her.
“How did I get here?” Wherever here was.
Rakdel talked while she fiddled with the device, pressing it here and there along her leg. “Your creature’s name is Khee?”
At Talia’s nod, she continued, “Well, then, Khee came and found one of ours, and then pretty much dragged her back to wherever you were holed up. Wouldn’t let up until you were here. Singleminded, that one.”
That he was. A sweetness welled within her, an emotion she hadn’t felt or wanted to feel in a long time. It was the drugs, she thought. Making her soft.
That was followed quickly by a sharper, jangled thought.
“One of ours?” she asked.
“I was going to say earlier, before I was interrupted…” Rakdel sent a quick glance at Omuf-Rhi, who laughed and held up his bandaged arm with a look of feigned pain.
“Ouch?” he said.
She merely shook her head at him. “Greyes Rakdel, chiurgeon and healer, in the service of Enthait, the orness, and the poison eater.”
Talia had so many questions, but held her tongue. She’d learned from her interaction with Isera that while Enthait was too large of a city to know everyone, it wasn’t a place that saw many strangers. People didn’t cross the vast expanse of orange desert to come here. There was no reason to bring more attention to who or what she was. A stranger.
Rakdel removed the device from her thigh, shook it, and then put it to her ear for a moment. Whatever it told her, her face seemed pleased with the result.
“I won’t lie to you,” she said. “Your wound was very, very bad. So bad that I can’t actually believe you’re alive. The infection was…” She wrinkled her nose. “Let’s just say that if your creature is single-minded, you are more so. Most wouldn’t have survived that, not even if I’d taken the leg.”
Rakdel allowed her glance to flow toward Talia’s missing arm, the scarred flesh at the end that she normally kept wrapped in fabric, but which now rested, exposed, on her lap.
“Anyway, you should heal just fine,” she said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to stay here a few days, rest up. Eat something, maybe.”
Talia shook her head, unable to speak for a moment, at the unexpected kindness that made the back of her throat hurt. She didn’t have the room, or the money, for kindness.
“I can’t. I don’t even have a way to repay you for what you’ve already done,” Talia said. “Nor…” it hurt to admit, “any skills for trade.”
“You could take that creature of yours to the Keep,” Omuf-Rhi said. “He’d kill half the animals in there in the first bout and you’d earn yourself some…” He faltered as he realized they were both looking at him, Rakdel with a fierce expression that pulled her skin even tighter over her cheekbones. Talia didn’t know what her own face was doing, but she could feel a quick heat rising on the back of her neck.
“Sehwa,” he said, holding up both hands, palms out, laughing. “I’m teasing. I’m teasing. Probably smarter for you to become the poison eater anyway, with that kind of resolve. You’d certainly outlast the last one.”
“Out,” Rakdel said. It was fierce, but that ferocity didn’t quite cover up her attempt not to laugh. “Get out, before you say something that really makes me regret you.”
Omuf-Rhi rolled his many eyes at Talia, as if to say, “Be on my side, yes?” but the response was not without a wry smile. “Well, poison eater or not,” he said. “You can come and work in my store anytime. Repay me for these new holes in my arm. Protect me from thieves and the like.”
The irony of that didn’t escape her. Nor, she thought, him, for a moment later he lifted her pack up into her line of sight. “Here’s everything from your… place. Except the creature, of course, who’s outside. Which seems right, since he’s currently the only one among us who doesn’t actually need the medical attention of our city’s greatest healer.”
“Out,” Rakdel said again. This time he went without furth
er protest.
Rakdel picked something off the table next to her. “I don’t know if you want this, but it came out of your leg, so it’s yours to do with as you will. Sometimes it’s important to know the things that try to kill us.”
Talia held out her hand, let Rakdel drop the object softly into it. It was thin sliver of metal, no bigger than her thumb. A jagged, broken piece of blue-black blade. Talia fisted her hand around it, felt it cut her and was glad that the drugs had not dulled that pain at least.
Rakdel was looking her up and down, slowly. Talia tried not to squirm under the gaze, knowing everything she saw. Threadbare and torn pants, torn leg, missing arm, hair fallen from its wrap.
“You’ll stay,” she said finally. “A few days, at least. Khee too.”
“No.” She tried to get up, fell back. But she was nothing if not determined and she got herself up and out of the bed.
“You’ll stay,” Rakdel said, but she didn’t move to stop her.
Out the door, and there in the room was Isera, asleep on a cot. She was still in her uniform, and in her sleep, she’d tossed one long arm over Khee, who was staring at her.
like.
Rakdel had been right – she’d stayed.
And now, she wondered if it had been the right thing to do. She half-crawled into the hole and found the stash of things, most of them as she’d left them. The food was, not surprisingly, torn into and destroyed. But the rest was there, still in the pack she’d stolen to keep it in. She slung it over her shoulder, and with Khee at her side, she climbed the broken and crumbling section of the wall.
From there, she could see down into the city on one side and down to the desert on the other. She’d come to Enthait from the south. She remembered little of the trip. Pieces. Ice and then forest and then this orange desert, eternal it seemed, where she had thought again and again that she would die. She didn’t know what lay to the north or the west, and from here, it was near impossible to tell in the dark.
When she looked over the city, she could see most of the skars from here, even in the dark, their silhouettes shadowed against the blackening sky. The top of the long rectangular zaffre headquarters was barely visible in front of the clave, but the lights of the Eternal Market flickered with such strength that she wondered how far away you could see its spiral.
The wall was wide and she paced without paying mind to the structure beneath her feet. Khee trailed behind, sometimes stopping here and there to snuff at something moving inside the wall, but mostly keeping pace, quiet, waiting for something. Waiting for her.
She told herself she was getting perspective. But really what she was getting was even more confused. With each step, she felt the weight of what had happened to Isera and the others. No death, not this time, but injuries. And what of next time, when she sent them off into the world, unprepared for what was ahead of them? What happened when her lies got one of them killed?
“And there shall in Enthait be a weapon, so grand, so glorious, so powerful, it shall destroy all of the enemies and all of the beasts and all of the living and all of the dead and only the orness, the keeper of the aria, shall remain,” she said out loud.
The line was from a dusty tome she’d found buried in a stack of Omuf-Rhi’s books. She’d memorized it, kept it on her tongue like a seed every time she felt the vordcha coming for her, real or fake. She thought she’d wanted to be the poison eater, to see the danger coming, but then she’d read that and realized she’d been all wrong. She needed more than a long view of coming danger. She needed a weapon. A weapon so powerful it left nothing standing.
But at what cost? She knew that too, but had sidestepped the answer.
It had never been her plan to care about Enthait. About the people who moved and lived and loved inside its walls. She had become the poison eater not for them, but for herself.
The image of herself kneeling at Maeryl’s side in the snow came unbidden, cold shivering up her spine, and the thing she’d forgotten in the poisondream, the word she’d whispered. Vengeance.
No, not for herself. For Maeryl. For Kanistl. For Anthleaon. For those who came after – the ones that the vordcha would turn into martyrs. And, yes, all right, maybe a little for herself.
She would not let go of that promise. But surely there was another way. She could run, let the vordcha track her to some other place, one where she could try to fulfill her promise without hope of succeeding. If she ran, the orness would find another poison eater, a true one. One that would take the poison and protect the city, protect the people, where she had failed.
But that was not a plan she could bear either; the city had not had a true poison eater since the orness. She didn’t know how long that had been, but rumors said fifty years, sixty. More. The orness must be a hundred by now. Everyone else who had taken the poisons had died. Even Burrin, she thought, would die. For all she thought he hungered to be in her place, she could imagine only one reason that the orness would not appoint him the position. To protect him. To keep him from death.
She could go to the orness and tell her the truth, ask her to wield the aria against the vordcha. She couldn’t imagine the orness believing her, not after she’d been lying to her, to the whole city, this whole time. Not that she knew how to find the orness anyway; she’d only ever seen her at the poisonings. Where did she live? How did she rule without being a presence in the city? She didn’t know. She’d have to get to her through Burrin and that… that wasn’t going to happen.
Do you promise to serve the city of Enthait? Do you promise to serve its people?
Yes.
Every choice she’d made here, selfish, fearful. She had stayed, telling herself it was different from running. But it was the same.
Will you run now? The question echoed her footsteps as she stepped along the wall. The city was silent here, exhaled no song, as if making room for the clang of her thoughts. Yes. No. Either way, the losses seemed unbearable.
The truth was she wasn’t saving herself. She wasn’t saving anyone. It was time for her to stop pretending to be something she was not. She was no hero, not to Khee or Maeryl or Isera or even to herself. Surely not to the city of Enthait.
Broken, one-armed, fallen coward.
Khee kept pace, silent, as she climbed off the wall and headed south across the city, until they were back in the room that she’d come to think of as hers, but which now seemed to belong wholly to someone else.
It wasn’t until she’d hung the cloak on the hook and laid the hexed metal band on the table that she realized she’d made her decision. She had to leave Enthait. Allow the orness to choose the true poison eater. The thought felt heavy, as if the world itself was pulling her down, but also true, and there was a lightness in that.
She gathered the rest of her things into her pack. Not that she had much. A few more shins, some dried meats and fruit. The first set of clothes she’d bought here – long striped pants and a silverweave shirt that molded to her torso and provided a modicum of protection. She thought about leaving the blue-black split of metal, but in the end, she slipped it into the pocket of her pants, not minding the sharp edges through the fabric.
She stood before the seven silver marks on the wall. She touched each of the circles, surprised at how little emotion she had about them. She’d expected this to be the hard part.
“We have to leave, Khee,” she said.
She could feel Khee’s eyes on her before she turned. His stripes flickered brown-yellow and then settled back to brown. He fumbled for the word he wanted, a jumble of no understanding that rode through her.
“Try again?” she said.
This time it was direct and hollow-pointed and clear.
Softness?
His question jabbed her, fast and fisted, in the stomach. She could barely answer, couldn’t bring her voice to rise more than a whisper. “No. No, Seild’s not coming.”
She knelt so that her face was level with his, and put her hand on the side of his head. He leaned
into her, his breath warm on her wrist.
“You can stay, Khee,” she said. “Stay with Seild. Stay with Isera.”
stay
She felt his answer in her gut too, another punch, another knock of her breath against her teeth that forced an audible exhale from her. Yes, of course he would stay. What did she have to offer him? A life of running, a life of…
stay
he said again, and this time she understood he meant something else entirely. Not that he would stay, but that she should.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She couldn’t bear to hear and feel his next word, whatever it might be, and so she stepped out her door and onto the street without waiting for it. She would leave it to him to decide. Come or stay. It should be his choice. If he came with her, or he had something to say, she would know either way. But she couldn’t take another gut punch. Not yet. Not while looking into his face.
Night had fallen while they’d been inside, but the moon was as full as she’d ever seen it, pale and luminescent. It seeped into every corner, chased out what few shadows remained until they stretched long and thin into the street. It was as if the day had come while she’d been gathering her things, if day was blue lit and powdered with stars. She blinked in the brightness of it.
So when the shadow, something blacker than shadow, moved forward into her line of sight, she raised her hand to her eyes as if to ward off a coming darkness.
“Talia,” the darkness said. There was no formality, no address, but Talia recognized the voice at once.
“We should talk,” the orness said.
Talia’s whole life, she’d been good at avoiding things. It was what had gotten her this far. Scathed and broken, yes, but also alive.
For almost as long as she had been in the blackweave she had avoided, for example, the truth of how she came to be one of the Twelve Martyrs of the Forgotten Compass.
The vordcha stole me when I was young.
That was the story she had always told herself.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 11
