They stole me when I was young. She didn’t know how young, exactly. Old enough to have spoken her first words – she could remember the shape of them on her tongue, even if she couldn’t remember their sound. She saw the world at the height of other people’s knees rather than their feet, but she got the sense that was a recent development. Old enough to have a name, a now-secret name that she only dared whisper, for fear of remembering.
There was only one lie in that story she told herself. A single word.
Stole.
Stole was the wrong word, but it was the one she always thought first, throwing it up like a shield to protect herself from the truth.
A better word, a truer word, was given. The monsters hadn’t taken her. She’d been given to them.
An easy trade for a promise of safety and safekeeping. A promise barely heard over the better promise of more of the white fruit that split open around a blood-red pit. There was a memory she never looked at, of faces – her parents? She couldn’t be sure, although the woman had eyes like hers – dipped into white flesh, smeared and dripping, gnawing as if the hunger would never end. Eyes glazed and unseeing. Unseeing her as they handed her over without questions, without concerns.
She refused to remember those blackened hands, the overlong fingers that hummed and crackled as they curled across her eyes, her mouth, her neck. The slick black skin. The acrid, rotting smell of her own breath as she sucked it in between the press of failing flesh.
Talia had always been good at avoiding things.
The orness was standing in front of her, and her first instinct was run.
“Don’t,” the orness said, as if she knew. Talia wondered if the orness knew, too, that she was planning to leave. Somehow. An impossibility – she hadn’t spoken the words aloud, not to anyone but Khee – and still. There was timing and then there was timing.
She scanned the bright wide street, the narrow thin alley that led off it, dark as shadow. One of those might allow her to escape. Then Khee was behind her, pressing his body to the back of her knees. Cutting off her route to flee.
Traitor, she thought.
stay, came his answer. Soft as a purr in the base of her belly.
As far as Talia could tell, the orness carried no weapons. Talia saw no zaffre, no greyes. Dressed simply in a robe the color of a puddle reflecting night, black with constellations of stars across the sleeves, she was barely visible even in the bright light. Her hood was pulled up, hiding her hair. Her face was such a slippery thing. Like trying to grasp the very air with your eyes. Talia focused on the silver hoops that ran up the orness’ right ear; they glowed faintly inside her hood and gave Talia’s gaze something to hold on to. The shifting shadow of the orness’ face and outfit ached her eyes.
She was looking at the thing she’d hoped to become. And for a moment, she couldn’t remember why she’d wanted it, needed it, so badly.
The orness’ hands were palmed together, holding what at first looked like a very small version of the moon. Oblong and pale white, it seemed to give off its own light. An impossibility, but oddly she was growing used to those. Maybe impossibility just kept moving further out as you moved forward.
The orness saw her looking and opened her hands. “Moonfruit,” she said. It rested on her palm so lightly it didn’t actually seem to be touching the skin. “A gift, of sorts. They’re quite rare.”
“Why would you give me a gift?” Talia said.
“I get the sense that you are…” the orness tilted her head, like a shadow shifting, “thinking of traveling. I’d like to talk first.”
“And then?”
The orness tossed the fruit from one hand to the other. It rose in a long arc, then fell lightly, slower than it should have, until it just barely rested on her opposite palm. “And then if you choose, you may…” She paused. “Choose.”
“About what?” Khee wasn’t letting loose the pressure on the back of her knees. She was pinned.
“It is a longer conversation than I’d like to have in the middle of the street at night,” the orness said. “Come tomorrow, for taf. Bring the fruit. I’m a bit hard to find otherwise…” Her voice trailed away, sentence unfinished.
She tossed the fruit to Talia, a leisurely throw that slowed as it came toward her. Talia went to catch it with her hexed hand, realizing a moment too late that she’d left the band back in the room. The moonfruit sailed past, but so slowly that she had time to reach out with her true hand and pluck it from its endless descent.
When she looked up again, the shadow was gone, as if it had been nothing more than the poison dream.
* * *
There was no way she was staying, no way she was meeting the orness for taf. Sometimes the rituals here made her head spin, how everyone believed in them. All you had to do was look at Talia’s own face, the supposed embodiment of the poison eater, and realize what kind of farce it all was.
She should have gone right out of the gates despite the orness’ request, kept moving, kept her promise, but something was keeping her here. A mystery that she couldn’t unravel. It was eating at her. Picking at her. Like she was picking at the moonfruit in her lap.
They were on the wall near the gate. She’d gotten this far toward leaving the city, but hadn’t been able to make it any farther. Under the moon, the Tawn nearly glowed, a luminescent orange landscape that seemed like it might burst into flame at any moment.
“What does she want to talk about, Khee? What is all that…” She tried to mimic the orness’ voice, but it came out all wrong somehow. Suddenly, she couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like. “‘And then if you choose, you may choose’? What does that even mean?”
He gave her no answer.
“Oh, now you’re quiet, you traitor.”
In her hand, the moonfruit wasn’t weightless the way it had seemed in the orness’ grasp. Instead, it was quite heavy for its size, clearly ripe. She used the blue-black blade to split the skin. It was tougher than she expected, leathery. It made her fight for it, and then she wished she hadn’t. Beneath its pretty skin, the fruit smelled bad. Rank and raunchy. Musky. Far more animal than plant. Even Khee bared his teeth and shook his head when she held it to him.
“Some gift, Khee. Do you think she’s trying to poison me?” She laughed at that, a black and unpleasant thing that she hated even as it came from her mouth. “Ah well, too late.”
She ripped off a bit of the flesh, mostly for spite, and was surprised to find that its taste was beyond pleasant, perhaps one of the best things she’d eaten since she’d arrived. Sweet and cool, with something in it that made her cheeks buzz with pleasure.
“I still don’t like her,” she said around a mouthful of fruit. “Telling me to meet her, like a child.”
Although spoken aloud her words did sound, even to herself, like a child. Like Seild in one of her rare moments of overtired pouting. But she didn’t mean to be petulant. And she wasn’t, in truth, angry at the orness. She barely knew the woman, beyond the rumors and the stories. Her ire was at herself, that she’d made a decision, a hard decision, the right decision. And yet it had been so weak that one small thing had thrown her off the path.
Not so small. She is the orness.
What did that even mean? To be the orness? Talia knew. She’d done her research. It meant to be the one with the power in her hands. The power to not just keep herself safe, but to destroy monsters. Monsters like the vordcha.
Perhaps the answer was to tell the orness the truth. To ask for help. To make her help. For the city. That was her promise, her purpose, wasn’t it? To help the city? How could she say no?
“Fine, Khee,” she said, as if he’d just spent all this time convincing her. Which she supposed he had, in a way, if only by his silence. “I’ll go talk to the orness. But she’s not going to like it.”
She bit down into the fruit and was surprised to find her teeth hit something solid. In the middle of the fruit, after she’d eaten it all, she found a pit. Tiny a
nd metallic. In the shape of a star.
She looked down at the remaining pit, remembered the orness’ words. Bring the fruit. I’m a bit hard to find otherwise.
“Skist,” she muttered.
* * *
In the morning light, after a fitful sleep – this time her dream was not of the orness coming to close her eyes, but of the orness forcing them open, feeding her eyes full of the shine of moons and stars – Talia turned the star-shaped pit over and over in her hand. It was more ornate than she’d realized. Not just a pit, but something created, fashioned. A perfect, five-pronged star, the points sharp enough to break her skin with hardly any pressure. The entirety of its surface was covered over in symbols, letters that she didn’t recognize, swirls. When she shook it, she heard something small rolling around inside.
She’d fallen asleep on the wall – not her first time, but certainly her first in a long time. This time she woke with an ache in her neck that wouldn’t recede. Gone soft.
Her missing hand had more to say than usual. Sometimes she thought if she could just… she didn’t know. Touch something with its memory or will her hand to come back, if only for a moment, it would do so and then she could say she was sorry for cutting it off, and it would forgive her and go quiet. As if it was just waiting on the other side of a door, and all she had to do was figure out how to open it.
Of course, she knew that wasn’t true. Her hand and arm were just bone and metal now, a gristly remainder for someone else to find someday, buried in the dirt and soil alongside the blackweave.
From here, she could see the city, waking. It no longer sang, but those moving within its walls gave the morning a different sound. The loudest of the hawkers coming from the market – calls of fresh-baked pastries and morning fruits – mingled with the squawks and grunts of animals, the upstart of machinery. Groups of children gathered in clusters, on their way to one of the central schools where they would spend half the day learning basic skills and the other half training for their eventual zaffre tests. Zaffre milled about, too, in their blue uniforms, their colors slightly more muted, their outfits less detailed than those of the greyes.
For as busy as the city was, there was no movement from the direction where she’d sent Isera, Burrin, and the others. Come back, she willed. Come back and prove Ganeth true. But she couldn’t will them to appear any more than she could will her arm back into being.
Far below, on the outer edge of the wall, Khee was walking along the strip called the vallum, sniffing into the cracks and crevices with his weirdly angular head. He wasn’t made for that kind of hunting, she didn’t think, and a second later, as if to prove her right, he lifted his wide face and opened his mouth to scent the air. His eyes were closed, and as he pushed his two long tongues out into the world, seeking for something she didn’t know, she thought that he might be, at that moment, a picture of joy. Hard to know, but something in her shifted, the way it did when she watched him tumble with Seild, and it made her happy, if only for that moment, seeing him there.
He moved along the vallum, still scenting the air. The area was busy, filled with workers, as it often was in the days after the poisoning. It was weird to think that something that she did, that she was involved with, had such an impact. On the lives of those who bet on her. The lives of the zaffre who hunted down what she saw. Said she saw. The lives of these people, who bustled and built and planned against the creatures they believed she’d seen.
These were weapons, but weren’t like the cyphers and artifacts that Ganeth and the zaffre used. And as far as she knew, the builders weren’t part of the zaffre at all. Just people who believed that if the dangers got through the zaffre, it was best to be prepared, however they could. So they drove wooden stakes and wrapped sharpened sticks with wire and built traps out of discarded metal and synth. It gave the look a mismatched, junked feel, and yet from up here, there was a beauty in it. Or at least a comfort, in the long line of tools designed with a single purpose – the safety of the city.
There was a second row, farther out, called the deadly vallum. Not built here, but brought here. The remainder of every danger that had once threatened Enthait. The buried detonations. The shields and zappers, the electric devices. Each danger required a different type of device, something that was specifically designed to damage them. Over the years, the wall had become a long, wide row of devices, some working, some not. Some visible, some buried.
She’d heard the stories, like the ones the actors told to kids in the market. How, long ago, the creatures had come from the south and tried to devour the city, then little more than a village. How they’d nearly succeeded, taloned and coiled and mawed. The villagers had fought, but the creatures had shorn the village down to its barest numbers, only those who could run or hide. And then the orness had used her weapon and… kala-booma! as Seild would have said.
Each time a poison eater told of a coming danger, the Aeon Priests around the city went to work. They made their best protection – armor, weapons, maybe a barrier or a shield – and then placed them all along the deadly vallum. Well, not the Aeon Priests themselves. They were too valuable. Someone else with less experience and knowledge than they. It was something that no one ever spoke about. A backup in case the greyes failed. In case the danger came all the way to the city.
As she watched, a young man, lithe and quick on his feet, danced across the devices, coming to a stop on top of a long, thin triangle, balancing his feet on either side. He settled an orb on the triangle’s very top, then positioned it, pointing it the way that the zaffre had gone. The way that she had sent them.
He saw her watching and gave her a wave and a quick grin. The gesture nearly knocked him off balance, and Talia held her breath until he caught it again and righted himself.
She hoped he wouldn’t recognize her, and for a moment, she thought she was safe. But then he looked at Khee, walking the vallum, and back at her. At least in his precarious position, it meant he wasn’t likely to try to honor her. But he did anyway, taking a moment to plant his feet more cleanly on the sides of the pyramid and then covering his eyes with his thumbs.
Oh, child, she thought. Do not fall. I have enough death on my hands already.
And he didn’t, miracle of miracles. He wobbled, she raised one thumb to her eye in a gesture that was more “please pay attention to what you’re doing” than anything formal. He went back to settling the device in its proper position on the top of the pyramid. Her exhale was loud enough that Khee glanced her way, and then left the path and began to walk back toward the wall where she sat.
In some way she did not understand, the vallum was protected. To walk from the city to the Tawn, you stayed on the path. But to walk from the Tawn to the city was another thing entirely. The path didn’t appear. Not ever, as far as she could tell. You had to pick your way through the scattered debris, the treacherous piles of detonations and devices. She’d done it a few times and thought she’d made it because she was human, and could understand how human minds worked. But Khee seemed to have no problem either. What good, then, the vallum, if any beast could figure out how to walk across it?
But Khee was not any beast, was he?
No longer concerned that Khee wouldn’t find his path, she returned her attention to the pit in her hand. She’d seen that pattern somewhere else, the loops and letters. She closed her eyes, sifted through the tumbling images in her brain, rejecting each one as it passed by without connecting.
Isera.
The zaffre.
The poison symbols.
The Eternal Market.
Books & Blades.
And then it came to her: the skars. All of the skars bore a pattern carved out of their tall shapes. She’d thought they were random, a sign of destruction or age, of wearing away. But now she wasn’t so sure. Her fingers trembling, she turned the star over and over in her hands. Was it a key? A map? One of Ganeth’s devices?
She stood just as Khee reached her. She held the star up to each
of the skars, trying to match the symbols on the star with the ones on their sides. Nothing that she could see. They were similar, but nothing was a perfect match.
Khee was watching her curiously. “Thoughts?” she asked.
see
he said.
Oh, but he was maddening.
“Someday I hope you learn to talk in complete sentences,” she said.
He stamped a foot on the wall, so clearly frustrated with her that she had to laugh. She lowered the star toward him. “Well, you figure it out then.”
He snorted at her.
The star sang. It sang. Like the city sang. Wind through metal. An instrument. Of course. How had she not seen that?
“Do it again, Khee.”
He did, and it did. A single, small note. But it was the city’s note, its power undiminished by its size. Rain and blade.
But how did that help her find the orness? She lifted the star to her own mouth, blew with more precision and length than she might have expected from Khee.
A moment later, she heard a soft low whistle in return. She stood there for a moment with the star in her hand, uncertain whether she’d actually just heard that sound.
She lifted the star to her mouth and tried again. Again, a few seconds later, a whistle back. Somewhere off to the northeast.
“Well done, Khee.”
She didn’t need words for the glow of satisfaction that he sent, a warmth that thrummed through her chest.
“Let’s go.” She hopped off the wall and began to follow a halting, discordant pattern through the city: stop, blow into the star, listen for the song. She was grateful that almost no one paid her any mind as she passed them; it was early enough in the day that people were about their own business. It was easier than she would have expected to follow the sound, as though the city was somehow helping her, delivering the song to her ears in a way that guided her.
In so doing, she arrived at a skar. She didn’t know the name of this one – it was perhaps one of the most banal of them all. Fairly small, the top a bit broken off, its pattern less intricate than the rest. She should have studied up more on the patterns and the names. Too late now.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 12
