Athmor was slow of speech, rigorous in his rituals, leaving her longing for Seild’s quick impatience with the process. He’d seemed a little leery of Khee when he’d first entered her room, and she’d hoped that might speed up the formalities, but no such luck. She stood before him, fiddling with the blue-black blade tucked under her armband, for what seemed like hours while he recited each of the proper poisons.
While her instinct was to blame the orness for the change of events, she thought it more likely to do with the fact that Isera was still in incubation. Last time she’d crossed paths with Rakdel – her on her way in, Talia on her way out – the chiurgeon tried to explain to Talia everything that had gone wrong, in far too much detail, and even though she was trying to help, she never actually did. Ganeth wasn’t much better. Mostly, he just shook his head and handed her something. Last time, it was a metal triangle that chirped and whirred, but didn’t seem to do anything else. She supposed it was his way of offering comfort. Or it was entirely possible that he was just handing her something because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.
She understood the feeling. There was a blackness stealing over her that she didn’t know how to shake. She slept little at night, often falling asleep over a book midday, waking into the glare, gasping fetid air, the linger of ebony fingers oozing across her face.
To top it off, Seild was angry at her. Well, angry at the world. Talia just happened to be the direction in which the girl’s emotions were aimed. And her aim was never off. “It’s your fault that my mom is like this. Yours.” And there was no way for Seild to know, and so it was just fear and anger, but it was so close to the truth that Talia almost couldn’t stand to hear it. But she did – she listened, and when Seild’s small fists and fierce headbutts found her, Talia let them come. Seild was the only reason she was standing here now, listening to Athmor drone on and on, giving the poisons power and name they didn’t deserve.
She rubbed her fingers together; her thumb was still wet from the ink. Eighth circle, eighth moon, eighth poison. And still she had no plan, no hope, no idea whether this would be the poisoning that killed her. Even if she lived, there would be no Isera after, no Scarlet Sisk. Whatever the outcome, she just wanted to be done with it.
“Poison Eater?” Athmor was finished, standing before her with his thumbs over his eyes. She got the sense he hadn’t been talking for a while now; long enough that he’d worked up the courage to nudge her gently. Not a chastisement – she hadn’t let him hang that long, but a query nonetheless.
She nodded. “Apologies. I am ready.”
The tunnel. The door. Talia went through the process, barely paying attention. Her gaze was inward, toward the shadowed blackness.
Inside the clave, almost everything as it always was. The crowd. The symbols. The greyes standing on each. The orness. It was hard not to see her face now, even beneath her hood. Talia had seen what was beneath Ganeth’s device, and there was no way to cover that back up.
Even Burrin was the same. The alert stance. If Seild were here, would she still draw in her breath, afraid? But Seild was not here, and Talia saw Burrin now as he was. Not an ally, not yet, but perhaps not an enemy either.
Only Isera was missing. The empty light shining up through the floor into the nothing that was her absence.
Talia didn’t know what she’d expected, but certainly she’d thought something else would have changed. But it was the same roar of the crowds, the zaffre in their places, the orness’ face still obscured. Even though she knew what she looked like beneath that device, she couldn’t find a single feature in the frame of her memory, not even with her standing here, right in front of her.
Everything was the same. Everything except her. Now she knew how false it was. Not just her. But the whole thing. Only the poison was real, only the deaths. A part of her wanted to stand in the middle of the clave and shout out the truth. You all believe in a farce, a lie! This will not protect you.
But she didn’t. Coward or savior, she didn’t know. She was who she was.
And the crowd wouldn’t have heard her or cared. Their chants were rising up into the domed roof, feet stamping along the floors, fists to the walls.
There was a new intimacy in the press of the orness’ thumbs. Not from something that the orness was doing differently, but from their shared knowledge. A thing that Talia carried in her brain like a seed, a tiny place from which knowledge and understanding began to grow. And darkness, there was darkness there too. A hidden, secret desire. Not vengeance. Something deeper. An unjustness that this woman had the power to hold a whole city in captivity, in falsity.
Except I know something you don’t, she thought. I know that somehow, some way, I am going to bring you down.
It was the first moment that she believed she might live through this poisoning. What had changed between her room and here? She didn’t know. But suddenly she knew: this poisoning would not kill her. And that knowledge bought her time and hope. Two things she desperately needed.
Talia felt the power balance between her and the orness begin to shift just slightly. It was almost as if the orness felt it too, for her thumbs pressed a bit harder to Talia’s eyes, turning so that the edges of her nails dug into the folds of her eyelids. That is the wrong place to start, Talia thought, just as the sharpness receded and she could see again.
“Do you promise to serve the city of Enthait?” the orness asked. “Do you promise to serve its people?”
“I do,” Talia said. And she thought it might be true.
“You may begin.”
Talia knelt before the device. She could feel the eyes at her back. The crowds, betting their lives and shins on something that had never existed. Setting their hopes on her, that she would keep them safe. Even more false than she’d thought.
She reached in, touched something hard and sharp. When she pulled it out, it was a purple crystal, squares stacked together, nearly as long as her pinky. Nearly as big around. It smelled of flowers falling open in the heat, but the angles, the length of it… Her throat was already tightening at the thought of trying to swallow such a thing.
The crowd chanted as she held the poison in her palm. “Iisrad! Iisrad! Poison Eater!”
She put the poison on her tongue. It turned into liquid so quickly she nearly choked it back out. Hot sweet spray that rose up the back of her throat into her nose. She coughed, once, a single, sharp bark.
I forgot to say Finwa, she thought. I forgot to say I’m sorry. I am going to die after all. And then the poison took her and she went down.
The poisoning – iisrad
Cathaliaste, the last of the Twelve Martyrs, stripped herself down, step by step. The sky fell, and she fell. The snow stopped and she stopped. Day broke and she went on, the mechbeast at her side.
Everything of her old life fell away.
The vordcha – their slick, black-oiled bodies glowing red through their skins. The shavings they’d made of their orifices before they’d gathered them back together into puckered and pinched overlays. The scent of their bodies in the blackweave, rot and rut and pus. The needles and injectors and metal weavings they pulled from themselves. Memories. Humanity. She saw them as oil and claw, their fleshless mouths that ripped and tore.
Her sisters, their white-cloaked bodies flowing red through the icing snow. Before that, the moments they’d stolen from the vordcha. Even in the screaming, there was strength.
She thought she had pulled every bit of the vordcha’s metal from her, tugging the thin wires of their memory out of her veins, the black stink coated with her blood. What she couldn’t pull out, she’d cut off. Her arm and the bits of her scalp that she’d carved off with nothing more than a thin blade and the grip of her teeth over tongue to keep her still. They lived in her no more. She was sure of it.
She could feel the blue-black shard of Maeryl’s blade in its nest inside her thigh. It rested, sheltered in her muscle, the sharpness cutting her away little by little with each ste
p.
The last to go was her name and her title, given to her by the vordcha, its power over her broken into two and then to three, stripped of its ranking, whittled to its core. She would reforge it anew in the wind and the walking. Herself too.
Talia.
She tried the name on like new clothing and the sound of it ripped the seams of the world.
“Talia,” she said out loud. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better. It was something more like her, anyway. Less like the creatures she’d come from.
Khee
said the creature at her side.
Talia was sure she would never get used to the creature’s sudden need to say something. Not an unwelcome intrusion, but an unexpected one nevertheless.
“Khee,” she said. To show she had heard.
The creature said nothing.
They moved, far and long. As straight a line as they could, their only sense of direction away. They ate little, slept less. The wind and ice hammered them or didn’t, and it mattered little. It was as if they both knew that there were only two outcomes: stop for something, anything, and the vordcha would come for them. Keep pressing forward and hope it was far enough.
In days, they were both delirious, hungry. Hydrated, at least, scoop after scoop of snow that was so thick and rugged it was almost like food. She tugged the hardest pieces she could find from the ground, passed it over her teeth and dreamt of meat.
“What do you think they are, Khee? Human? No. Monsters.”
Khee answered, words that made sounds into the sky, lined up and then fluttered away like wings. Words that she knew, but the order was off. The letters and lines shimmered, as if she were trying to read them underwater. Or pass them through a sieve that drained away their meaning.
He seemed to know she wasn’t understanding it, but didn’t have the means or the will to elucidate further.
After a time, the snow softened. Here and there, berries or bugs. Khee’s leg was healing, although he limped still. Her arm was, on the other hand, worse. Festering and red, a constant tickling ache, as though she was being burrowed into, stung by a hundred tiny insects. She was hot and then cold, and then hot again, and still she walked. Or was half carried, a stumbling body at Khee’s shoulder.
In that way, they passed out of snow and ice into the green of a forest and beyond, to an orange heat that shimmered like a living thing. She felt it against her cheeks in a moment when she was already aching and fevered, and she fell. Not because she needed to, but because she chose. She couldn’t hold herself up anymore. And for what? For the constant dream of being found again, of being hunted and brought low by the vordcha. No. She would go here, in the sand.
She could feel Khee watching her. Waiting.
“No,” she said. But she was saying it to all the ones who weren’t there. Maeryl. Her other sisters. The vordcha. Even the other mechbeasts who’d charged and tumbled and fought her. Her own fear. Her fallen knife, fallen life.
Eventually the sun went down and she rose up. She wasn’t well, not in the least. She wouldn’t survive this trip across the orange sands, she didn’t think. But she owed it to Khee to keep him company, to protect him from being alone for as long as she could.
“We’re safe here,” she lied. Each word fell from her tongue like a worm, like a root, squirming to the ground. She squished each one, before they could crawl back to the blackweave. Traitors. Spies.
The shadows that walked at night kept her up, creeping on the edge of her vision. Maeryl, with her fingers broken and bloody, sat on the dunes beside her. A bird with triangles for wings flapped on her shoulders, pecked out one of her eyes and drew it, long-rooted, away from her face with its bill.
Seeing her there, Talia understood that this was not true. Not the real, not the memory. Something wholly different. Something with purpose.
The space between them shrank until they were touching, thigh to thigh. Every breath layered in reek and rot. Something squelched through the fabric, bubbled wet against the side of Talia’s leg.
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” Maeryl said. “I couldn’t find you in the blackweave.”
Her voice was metal and Talia realized her mouth was too. Teeth and tongue and the black hole of her throat. Her face was covered in metal bandages that shone with red from the inside. The braids of her hair were black serpents tied off with their own pink tongues and the blacks of her eyes were spiders that fluttered their legs like lashes.
Her eyes bulged through the bandages, became vermillion buds that bloomed open into pink insides.
“You’re dead,” Talia said.
“You’re saying the obvious,” Maeryl said. “Say something different.”
She was petting Khee with gloved hands. Gloves that were hands. Carved from someone else’s body and sewn to her arms at the elbows. They billowed, fabric or synth or skin. Inside them, things small and black shifted and scuttled.
The thing that wasn’t Maeryl flicked a hand and ran it down Khee’s back. Except it wasn’t Khee, not really. It was Khee gone inside out, the red of his flesh a raw and ruddy skin. Sutures, puckered and pink, ran along the lines of his shoulders. The creature shifted, and something inside went the other way, broken and bulging. His four eyes were unseeing, white and thick, running with mucus. His snout lifted – the entirety of it nothing more than three rows of long, skeletal fingers that came together like teeth. Sharpened at the ends. He sniffed the air and blood spattered from the holes in his bones.
like
Or maybe it was
look
the creature said in something that had once been Khee’s voice but now was bitter acid in the bowl of her stomach. Talia put her hand over her mouth, trying not to retch.
At her feet, a tree sprouted, slithered up her leg. Blackened and broken at the trunk. The branches darkened with a thousand wings. Each opened its mouth and sang. Knifeblade. Flesh. Spattered storm. The bones of her spine ached with the tremble and caw. Her body snapped, bent backward, up on itself, until she was head and feet touching.
“Why are you here?” she asked with a mouth that no longer worked.
“You know,” the thing that was Maeryl and not Maeryl said.
I don’t! The words fell from her mouth, into the awaiting beaks below. Fought over. Snapped up before she could reach to save them.
The thing that was Maeryl and not Maeryl held up its cuffed hands filled with milky blood. Each of those hands was Talia’s, the skin rotted away to bone and metal. The fingers traced a shape upon a table made of whitened wood. Letters. Then words. Shimmering and white.
Around them, the blackweave grew. It pulsed like a living, breathing thing. A door opened, releasing shadows into the world. Shadows that shaped, hardened, became fleshless mouths that skitched and snapped. Slick black fingers lengthening to reach across space and time, wrap around her throat.
“Beware the salt,” the fingers said.
Laughter bubbled from the open sores in Maeryl’s face, even as her mouth split into two, unhinged into screaming.
“Charncharncharn,” the thing burbled as it tilted its fists. Rain poured down, drowned their feet with bone-white wet. “The sea is coming for you, sister. Fix the break.”
* * *
She woke, gasping. This time she knew, without question, what was real. It all was. The poisoning and this, her body, the bed, the Painter, standing over her. The charn. The orness. Even herself. All of it.
She was the poison eater.
And she was dying.
Not in the blackhang of poisoned memory. In the real.
All those times before had been nothing – echoed aches of pain, a misremembered leaving. This was death in her everything, the very things that made up the weave of her body. She felt them failing, one by one, the cloak of her skin turning inside out.
She coughed into the space of her missing fist, and the air came away from her mouth bloodied and flecked with white.
Beware the salt.
Ther
e was no more air, no more breath. None of the things she needed to make words. The poison had taken it all, filled her with its deadly multiplicities, spores that sprouted and grew into the hollow spaces inside her.
“Painter,” she tried.
The Painter was already unpacking his paints, perfecting his colors. She could smell them, acrid and dry as mothdust.
“Help me,” she said.
“I was not made for succor,” he said, “but beauty.”
He held the tip of his fingers, brushed and colored, to her eye. The color was right. It always was. The light slanted through the mekalan, shifting the letters across her face.
THE MOON DID MELD US AND WE DID SHINE
“You shall be beautiful upon the wall,” he said.
The weave of her body turned again, inside out, the pain of a thousand bee stings beneath her skin. Tearing down the length of her spine. Her vision slid, left her with shadows of shadows. She was nothing left but the bones of her lies. Bleached and broken, a tangled skein.
I couldn’t find you in the blackweave, Maeryl had said.
The sea is coming for you, sister. Fix the break.
The mech in her spine. Broken. Khee couldn’t talk to her. The vordcha couldn’t find her. They wouldn’t come for her.
They were all safe. The city, Khee, the others. She had done as the orness asked. She would die as the poison eater. No one would know that she wasn’t true.
The poison made her promises in whispers and slantlight. Strokes of comfort across her skin. One more turn, inside out, and then we’ll be done, us and you. All eternity upon the wall.
She was dying. And she was almost alone. And that was her penance and her poison and her place.
No.
You promised.
Softness?
Coming through the poisoned sweetness, echoing into the hollows left behind. Khee’s voice and her voice and Maeryl’s and the orness’ and Isera’s and even Burrin’s. Hope and promise and vengeance and something else. That thing she hadn’t had a name for. Not in the poisondream, not in the blackweave, not until this very moment.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 19
