Numenera--The Poison Eater

by Shanna Germain

  She hated the words, fought them. She should have cast them out from her as she cast out Khee. Made silence. Just her and the drift of silence now. That’s how it should have ended. If she hadn’t been a coward. If she hadn’t run.

  Live.

  Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  But they wouldn’t. And under their sound, the poison’s soft tongue grew rough, ripping away at her flesh. It became the long, burnt-scent hand across her mouth. Clackteeth tearing sutures open, that black slick slide of mech between the soft places of her body. Maeryl going dull after, losing days and space and time.

  She reached out with a hand that did not exist, and that hand became the thing it wanted to become and it was hexed and light and it grasped the Painter’s sleeve.

  “I need…” she said. What did she need? So many things. But first. “Ganeth. And Rakdel. Burrin.” There were more names, more things she needed, but she couldn’t say them.

  “I cannot,” the Painter said. He was uncoiling the wiring from his device, slow blue loops of metal that hurt her eyes to listen to. “It is my duty to shine you eternal.”

  “I am not…” Oh, it hurt her to say it, in so many ways. “I am not dead yet.”

  “Yet,” he echoed, and it sounded like he said it a hundred times, a thousand.

  “Next time. Next time I promise you can have me.”

  The sleeve slid from her hand, the light blanking away, the hand turning back to air, back to nothingness.

  Burrin was standing over her. How long? Her mouth had nothing in it. Not air, not words. She was shaking. From him? From her own body? It was hard to focus. Her tongue moved like meat long dead.

  “Like it better when I can hear you coming,” she said.

  “We are not that,” he said, but his voice carried no conviction. “Not friends.”

  “Dying.”

  His expression said nothing that she could read. But his words said everything. “I know.”

  He thought she’d asked him here to say goodbye. It might have made her laugh, if she’d been capable of laughing.

  “No,” she said. “Ganeth. Rakdel. Need them to fix me. Tell them my spine. They’ll know.” She could feel the poison slinking into her marrow, fighting at the edges of her eyes. “I have to go away now. Mihil, hurry.”

  She had no idea if he would do as she asked. And she couldn’t find the right word to keep herself in the world a moment longer. The blackness took her like a dark ocean and finally she drowned.

  * * *

  Light. Sound. Rakdel’s fingers against her neck. She fought the swim, lashed out with her hand and voice even after she knew what was happening, unable to stop herself, waiting for her body to catch up to her mind.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to Burrin. “Thank you thank you thank you.” But she didn’t know if she said it aloud, if he could hear her.

  Rakdel’s hand came back to her, at her shoulder. “We’re going to help you turn over,” she said.

  “I can.” But she couldn’t, not fully, and it took the four of them – Rakdel and Ganeth and Burrin and herself – to get her face down. Even so, she was panting, spittle-ridden. She soaked the sheet red with her exhales.

  A moment later, Khee’s fur was under her fingers. She closed them, tight, across the softness.

  “I’m going to give you something,” Rakdel said. “For the pain.”

  “No.” She couldn’t be out of it. Couldn’t be drowsy. She needed to be here, to be present. To see if it worked. If she was going to fight through this, she was going to fight through it.

  “There’s going to be a lot of pain,” Rakdel said.

  The sound coming from her throat was a bark. “I know.” She wasn’t a masochist. Pain didn’t interest her in that way. She was so many levels deep in pain that there was nowhere more to go. She could handle it. She needed to handle it. “Don’t dawdle.”

  Before this, she’d forgotten pain. Living in Enthait had softened her, some.

  She made it through the first cuts, the way she could feel the skin open across her back, but when she felt the first tug of the mech in her body, she howled. Pushed the sound through the fabric into the air and it was the song of every pain she’d ever carried. Hers. Maeryl’s. Her sisters’. Khee’s. All of them. Every break and slice and agony came back to her in a rush, and she breathed them out with the force of her whole voice.

  Khee pressed against her, a weight that meant something even in her red-black bruise of anguish.

  She felt someone’s fingers – Ganeth’s, likely, for he’d been smooth and sure up to that point – falter, and she broke the clench of her teeth apart to inhale. “Go,” she said. “Keep going.”

  Ganeth and Rakdel talked above her as they worked. About the mech. But even after her wails had quieted to sobs and sniffles, she couldn’t understand their words. She could hear Burrin, pacing, metal steps, steady, sure, around the room.

  Finally, the numbness came, and with it, a new understanding. She would not run. Somehow she knew that to be true, in a way she never had before. She would not run again. No matter how the end came, she would stand strong. She would fight with Khee at her side. And whoever else joined her. She would fight.

  Words came through the haze at her. Ganeth’s voice. “I think it’s fixed.”

  Rakdel’s voice. “How will we know?”

  And, a moment later, as if in answer, as she hadn’t even dared to hope,

  like.

  * * *

  She would have jumped off the cot and buried her face in Khee’s stripes, if not for the fact that Ganeth’s hands were still at her back. Closing her up. She could feel the tug of her skin, the shifting of the mech beneath it. Pain, but also a tingling satisfaction as he pulled each stitch tight.

  When she could sit, she pressed her hand to the side of Khee’s face, savored the weight of his head, the intensity of his gaze. “Welcome back,” she said.

  yes.

  She could tell they all had questions, but she didn’t have the strength to answer them. She didn’t even have answers. “Can I talk to Burrin for a moment?” she asked.

  When they were gone, all except Khee, who she couldn’t bear to let go of – her fingers were still curled in his fur – she said, “Burrin, something’s coming.” It was her turn to skip the formalities.

  “Something always is.”

  “No,” she said. Her throat was raw, and her voice came through shards of glass. “Something real.”

  He glanced away from the mekalan at her. She didn’t look at him. He touched a painted face. Then another. She waited for Burrin to make his next move. The eyes of the dead, watching her. Eternal. Eternity.

  Burrin waited, one beat, two, and then looked back over the painted faces.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Burrin, I think…”

  She thought of Maeryl – because now in the after, she could tell it was Maeryl in the poison dream. Not the Maeryl she had known, but Maeryl in the only way she could find to connect.

  And Khee too. Khee telling her to look. And she had.

  Winged creatures of metal and mist.

  How had she not known? How had she not put that together? The deliberate slicing away of memories. The vordcha weren’t the only ones.

  “The charn are coming,” she said.

  Burrin snorted softly. Disbelief. She didn’t blame him.

  “I saw them in the poisoning. It’s a long story, but they’re coming… they’re coming because of me.”

  She’d expected him to call her a liar. Or perhaps to laugh.

  He was looking intently at her face.

  “These are the moments when Isera is sorely missed,” he said. So many layers in that, Burrin peeling one back for her, if only for a moment.

  “Do you believe you are the poison eater?” he asked.

  The question caught her so off-guard that she answered honestly. “Yes.”

  Oh. Oh.

  “Good,” he said. He looked ou
t over the mekalan. The light came through and cast his face in colors. “Because I think you are too. Isera thinks you are. Seild and Khee think you are. You are the only one who does not believe.”

  The orness. The orness did not believe. The orness had told her so. The poison eater is a lie. But what if it wasn’t? What if the orness was wrong? Or a liar herself?

  She had a million things to say and not a single thing to say.

  “What do you need?” Burrin asked.

  “I need…” What did she need? She was so surprised by his question that she couldn’t think of the answer at first.

  The vordcha felt most real after the poisonings, Talia realized. Why? Because of the memories. That was the thing about memories. You had to look at them, didn’t you? Revisit them? In order to keep them alive. The vordcha had pushed their memories into their martyrs so they didn’t have to keep them.

  But they didn’t understand that all they had to do was not look at them again. Keep them locked up, in cages, and pretend.

  She needed the opposite. She needed to tell the story to someone. She needed to keep those memories, that fear, alive. And the only person she could share it with was the one person she was afraid to.

  “I need to wait until Isera has healed,” she said, and was surprised her voice showed no signs that she didn’t know if Isera would heal. “And then I need to tell you a story. All of you. Ganeth, Rakdel, Omuf-Rhi.”

  She could see him trying to decide whether to ask more questions, trying to decide whether to say yes. She only had part of a plan forming in her mind, but she had enough to know that she didn’t think she could do this without him.

  “Do you trust me, Burrin?”

  “Not even a little bit,” he said. But when he held his fingers up, there was just enough space to see the light between them.

  * * *

  A few days after the poisoning, Seild’s prayer worked. Or Ganeth’s mechskills did. Or Rakdel’s healing. Talia wasn’t entirely convinced they weren’t all the same thing. When you said a prayer and science answered, wasn’t that exactly what you’d asked for?

  “Everything should be normal now,” Ganeth said, although it was clear as he sprayed the sheath with a mister and the entire thing dissolved instantly that he had a different idea of normal than she did. Ganeth had suggested she send Seild and Khee off in the world for a bit, just in case things went poorly. She’d done so, but not without a sense of worry at his words.

  Her concern was not lessened as she looked down at Isera, silent, still, her breathing shallow, her eye still slathered in pulsing goo.

  The goo came off with a soft sucking sound. Beneath it, Isera’s grey eye was wide open. It blinked twice, contracted with the noise of wings, and then closed.

  “I have to get this back into the tank before it dies,” Ganeth said of the goo, which was seeping out over his palm with soft undulations. “Surprising how often I use it.”

  Talia didn’t even want to think about that. She could barely get the sucking sound of it leaving Isera’s face out of her mind. “I’ll stay with her,” she said.

  He hesitated. “Rakdel will come soon.”

  She nodded. “It’s all right,” she said. “I can do this.”

  She sat on the side of the bed carefully. The movement shifted the scars across her back, tightened her skin. But not as bad as before. She was healing.

  Shortly after Ganeth left, Isera came to. She tried to sit up, groaning softly. It was like watching someone come awake after a long night of too much drinking. Or perhaps much like what the Painter saw after a poisoning.

  “No,” Talia said. She put her hand on Isera’s arm. The contact jolted her; had it been so long since they’d touched? “Not yet.”

  For a moment, Isera’s face looked foggy as if she couldn’t remember what had happened to her or where she was, but quickly her expression cleared.

  “Talia,” she said, and fell back against the pillows. She looked as healthy as Talia had ever seen her. The blue in her hair brought out flecks of navy in her new eye. “Seild?”

  “Good. Off with Khee,” she said. “Probably giving him fighting lessons.”

  At Isera’s look of confusion, she shook her head. “Everything is fine. Ganeth was just here. He chided me for sitting on the side of your bed, lest I shake you too hard. But I’m doing it anyway.”

  Isera laughed, soundless, her nose wrinkling up. Talia kept going. “Can you imagine if I’d told him that I let Seild or Khee come and say hello while you were in there? I think he would have challenged me to a round of saglo. Although, let’s be honest, he wouldn’t have won.”

  Still laughing, Isera put her hand over her grey eye. Talia could hear it whir, adjusting. Talia tried not to imagine what she would see, sitting there. Were her old lies something visible, like a cloud around her?

  “For someone who doesn’t seem to care much about anything that’s not made of mech, Ganeth can be funny like that,” Isera was saying. “How his emotions come through. When I got my head ripped open by a ravage bear a few years back, he yelled at me the entire time that Rakdel was stitching me up.”

  Talia didn’t want to think about Isera and a giant bear either, claws and skin, but now the image wouldn’t leave her.

  “Ganeth says you’re doing great,” she said. “That you were lucky.”

  Lucky. Except not really, because it was some kind of horrible unluck that she was stuck with a woman whose lies had put her in harm’s way. No. That was a place in her head she wasn’t willing to go. Not again. This one wasn’t her fault. Not entirely.

  “I feel lucky,” Isera said. That half-smile, crooked. “And I can see you, your whole self, with both of my eyes, which is lovely.”

  What can you see?

  It’s my job to see true.

  Part of her wanted Isera to call her out, to say, “I see everything,” so she could come fully clean. But Isera didn’t. And that, no matter what Talia wanted, was better anyway. She had to do it herself. She was almost ready. She could feel it building in her. No more lies. She needed just a few days, a few perfect days with Isera before she broke everything to pieces with truth.

  “I do believe you’ve gone soft while you were in there, Greyes Isera,” she said.

  “Not soft. Starving. Dirty. Surprisingly tired. Is this what it’s like when you eat the poison?”

  She didn’t know, but it seemed close. “Probably. Similar,” Talia said. She didn’t mention that she’d almost died. She was sure Isera would hear it soon enough.

  “Do you wake up wanting me as much as I woke up wanting you?” Isera asked.

  “Probably. Similar.” But now she was teasing, and it showed in her words.

  “Then you should kiss me so that we can find out.”

  She did, and they did. It turned out the answer was yes.

  II. iisrad

  THESE TONGUES

  For a few perfect days, while Isera recovered, they fell into a routine. A slowlife of little more than flirting with Saric over saltpetals, watching Seild and Khee playfight in the yard, playing a few rounds of switchfall, a game that Talia was horrible at, but which she kept winning anyway because Isera had no poker face. Burrin and Ganeth came to visit, some of the others, for dinner or taf.

  Isera’s eye grew stronger each day. By the end of the week, she’d be back in uniform.

  To Talia, it felt like a beautiful day when you could see the storm just off the horizon. It wouldn’t, couldn’t, last, but she was refusing to look at the proof. Not yet, she kept thinking. Not yet. Just one more day. One more day before she had to tell Isera the truth. One more day before she had to step down that path of ending everything.

  That day came sooner than she expected. She and Khee were walking through the moonmarket, ostensibly in search of a pastry Isera liked. Something called ternes. But it was more than that. Talia wanted, needed, to touch the city with some inner part of her. To hear it and feel it around her. To connect with it. Eyes and hands and he
art. Sometimes she expected it to give her some kind of clue as to what she was doing. After all, it was the city she was supposed to be protecting. But other than its occasional song, she found the city to be silent on the matter.

  Khee pressed in beside her and she found herself reaching out to touch his fur periodically. He moved into her touch, and each time she was comforted.

  If the Eternal Market was where the goods lived, then the smaller, more hidden moonmarket was where the secrets lived. Here, the crowd was furtive, silent, heads down and hands in the shadows. Keeping to themselves. There was something hidden in every pocket, every transaction, every face. The roads here were split and scarred, broken down the middle, making it easy to lose one’s footing, and it gave people a perfect excuse to keep their gaze on the ground.

  Permanent stalls were rare here. Each person was their own store, carrying their supplies in boxes, or their hands, or small hovering carts. There were no saltpetals here, no frivolities, no music. Food, weapons, addictives, here and there clothing designed not for fashion but for furtiveness.

  A woman in an ornate wheeled chair rolled by, pushing herself over a sharp ridge in the road with a grunt. The brim of her tall, wide hat was covered with long sticks, each of which gave off a small blue glow and the scent of lemony incense.

  Talia found a food vendor by smell, bought him out of the dried jerky that hung in long strips from the pole he carried over his shoulder. She threw a piece to Khee, and tucked the rest into her bag for later.

  “Ternes?” she asked of the other food vendors as they went by. Most shook their heads. But one, a young man wrapped in a too-big coat topped off by a wide belt, nodded. He pulled open one of the sacks hanging at his waist, brought out a synth bag of yellow buns covered with some kind of seeds.

  “Two shins,” he said. “For the whole of them.”