“Again, please,” she asked.
The bird sang, and she echoed.
Again. Getting further from where she wanted, needed, to be.
She closed her eyes, and when the bird started, she did too. Matched it.
A moment later, she could put her hand through the material.
“Thank you.” She didn’t know who or what she was thanking, but the gratitude was enough to make her heart thump to her ribs.
Talia stepped through the door and fell down and down. She thought this time would be easier because she was expecting it, but no. She braced for the fall, and felt the jar in her knees and her spine as she landed.
The garden smelled thick and wet. Not at all the green lushness that she remembered. Fragrant flowers and fruit and honeys. This was the beginning of rot, an undercurrent of things turning toward decay. The air seemed thick, sluggish. Little brown spores seemed to linger in front of her face, falling impossibly slowly. She didn’t hear or see another person. What was happening?
The moss was squishy beneath her feet, not soft and spongy but sopping, wetting the soles of her boots with each step. She’d been following the orness last time, listening, and hadn’t realized how complicated the paths were. She’d assumed a single curve, following the circle of the Green Road, but that wasn’t how it worked. Every path branched and forked, following its own logic.
She remembered a few landmarks from last time – the trees, the beehives, the entryway to the orness’ garden. She would walk until she found one of them and then figure out where to go from there.
At the first fork, she took a left. Something about it seemed familiar, and then a right – that too, seemed like a thing she remembered, but it wasn’t very long before her memory had failed her completely. This was as bad as being in the tunnels. Worse, because of the sense of urgency she felt. With every step, she could hear the poison dream in her head saying charncharncharn.
Soon, she was out of light, and thought that, impossibly, she’d spent the whole day here, lost, sweating, swearing beneath her breath. But after a moment, she realized that she had moved, to be beneath the clave itself. Here, things grew too, bracken and pale green plants that opened into deep wells, half-filled with liquid.
The earth was wetter here, the moss deeper. Water splashed against the bottoms of her boots even when she stayed on the path. Fish creatures with two legs jumped or swam out of her way; their movement was erratic but fast. Around her face, she sensed and heard, but didn’t see, winged creatures that seemed to dip and dive. She swatted at them, and their low buzzing moved back, but returned a second later.
A tiny black creature – bird or bug? – no bigger than her thumb, dive-bombed her face with a spray of air that was acrid and bitter in her nose. She sneezed, and the movement carried her off the path just enough to step into water up past her ankle.
Skist.
This was not at all how she’d planned for this to go.
She should go back, retrace, but by the time she realized it, she thought she was already halfway across the clave. She moved straight across, on the one path she’d found that didn’t seem to turn and split. The clave was huge, and she had no idea what she’d find on the other side. But she needed to get out of this shadow, which seemed to grow heavier with each step.
Finally, she could see light ahead, slanting in long rays through the trees. She moved toward it, panting a little. The shade was somehow hotter than the rest of the garden, and she was heavily sweating. Even her hexed armband was irritating her skin, sweat and salt, and she popped it off and put it into her pocket. A mirrored orb wafted past her, clinging around her head until she brushed it away. It let out a low squawk, but didn’t stick around.
In front of her, a synthsteel building stood there, shaped something like an egg. Archways around the bottom of it. The glass was frosted, but she could see movement inside. Light, blinking blue, then yellow.
“Come, Talia.” The orness’ voice came through the material. It was still weird to hear her name in the orness’ mouth. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to it.
A door irised open, and Talia stepped inside.
Someone was sitting in a chair. Not a regular chair, but one made of synth and steel, big. Wires and tubes ran from it into the floor. It swiveled around to face her, but Talia couldn’t see how it worked.
“Well, that took you longer than I’d hoped.”
It was the orness she knew in voice alone. Seated upon the chair, which looked much too large for her, the orness appeared shrunken and hollowed out, as if someone had been scooping at her flesh. Beneath, her cheeks dug into her face like sinking caves. Her eyes too were sunken and bloodshot.
Talia lifted her thumbs to her eyes. Not out of habit so much as for the opportunity to hide even part of her face briefly.
“I am impressed,” the orness said, and followed the words with a rasped cough. “And here I didn’t think anything could shock you into that expression. You’re usually so…” The orness lifted a bent and gnarled hand and ran it through the air in front of her face. “Stonefaced is the expression I’ve heard. But I appear to have done it. Or, rather, my appearance appears to have done it.”
“You really are dying,” Talia said. She hadn’t meant it to sound so matter-of-fact. It was just that she hadn’t entirely believed it until this moment. “I’m sorry. That was–”
“Nothing more than the truth,” the orness said. “Besides, I might have had an inkling.”
Talia had known in her heart that she was right about the orness, but she could not have guessed it was like this, so soon. Last time she’d seen her, the orness had been standing, as she always did. Tall, straight. Wearing her cloak and her false face and pushing those nailed thumbs against her eyes.
“Each time you live, I die a little more,” the orness said. “That’s the way it works. The way it’s always worked.” She lowered her voice a little, as if telling Talia the secret. “Will you talk with a dying woman, Poison Eater?”
Poison Eater indeed. After all the things she’d told her. Everything in her wanted to say no. What right had the orness to ask that, even if she was dying?
It wasn’t pity that turned her hand, but need. She needed the orness as much, perhaps more, right now than the orness needed her.
There were two chairs across from the orness’. Nothing so elaborate or tall, so she chose the one closest and sat. The heat and wet were far worse than last time, even though there seemed to be a kind of cooling mist coming through the glass. It brushed against the back of her neck, chilling her, before it moved on to some other spot in the room.
At a barely visible movement from the orness, one of the guards appeared, set a pot and a single cup on the table. “Taf?” the orness asked.
“No.” It was impolite to refuse – beyond impolite – but she couldn’t bear to sit there and sip a drink and smile and make useless prayers as propriety. Not now.
The orness barely allowed a response to show in her face, although she said, “I didn’t think so.”
“So then, let’s talk,” Talia said. “About your lies.”
The orness coughed at that, and it took Talia a moment to realize she was actually laughing.
“Oh yes,” she said, after a moment. “My lies. My lies are to serve the city of Enthait. What do yours serve, other than yourself?”
Rather than look at that question and answer – she’d already done so, thank you very much, and did not care to do so again – Talia felt a pang of something like delight. The orness had practically just admitted that she had lied.
“Were you lying to me? Or did you just not know?” She thought she knew the answer to that. The orness was many things, but she was not naive. Surely she had known everything she’d said and done. Talia wanted to hear her say it. She didn’t know why. She guessed it was because it seemed like the time when everyone was finally, finally coming clean. If she had told her truth, she thought it was high time the orness did.
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br /> “Of course I knew.” She almost sounded offended.
“So you’re telling me you threatened your granddaughter just to play with my belief system?”
If the orness reacted to that, Talia couldn’t see it. “You believed that I threatened my granddaughter. I quite like the child, even if I never do get to see her anymore.”
Anymore. She wondered what that had looked like. Had someone brought Seild down here for a nap and taf? She didn’t think so. More lies? Wishful thinking? Or something else?
“Why, then?” Talia said. “Why all of it?”
That sound of disappointment through her teeth. “You are smarter than this. Why do you continue to ask me questions that you already know the answer to?”
“You chose me because I was new.”
“And?” As if it was Khee and not the orness. Egging her on. But also helping her understand when she was on the right path.
“Because…” Talia filtered through everything in her brain, tried to put the pieces together. “Because I didn’t believe.”
“Because you didn’t believe,” the orness echoed, simply, as if she was surprised that it had taken Talia so long to figure it out on her own. “I could see it in you, each time you came to take the poison. You thought you were false.”
“You told me I was. You told me everything I knew was false. I believed it.”
“And what…” the orness coughed into her closed fist. It was wet and, if her face was any indication, painful. “…do you believe now?”
That you lied. But more than that. “That I am the true poison eater. That there is such a thing. That I will eat the tenth poison and I will become the orness.”
“If the tenth doesn’t kill you.”
“I was never false, was I?”
“You never were. You just needed to believe. Heart and head. Through all doubt, through all the lies, through your own needs. Through me. To serve Enthait, you had to believe in it, so that it could believe in you.”
She gave Talia a meaningful gaze. “And so that others could believe in you.”
Talia was no longer surprised to understand that the orness had likely seen or heard their entire conversation last night. It was likely that the orness had been watching her from here as she’d yelled and screamed to the sky, trying to get in.
“What if I didn’t believe? What if I’d died? Walked away?”
The orness lifted her thin shoulders, barely a movement beneath her shirt. “There are others.”
It stung. Not the words so much as the dismissal. Because even now, after everything, in some small part of her heart, she believed in the orness, in the poison, in the eternal promise of all of it. That she was chosen by something – or even someone – greater than herself. Wanted to believe. It’s not the same thing.
Isn’t it?
She didn’t know.
“Others,” the orness repeated. “But not like you. I think that if that had happened, we would have lost a lot of lives to the Eye after you. But I believed in you. Even when you couldn’t. Even when I couldn’t say it.”
“I think you are a monster.”
“As you will be some day, when you are sitting in this chair. As all of us become.” She sounded sad and tired, and less like herself than Talia had ever heard her.
She didn’t want to pity the orness, and she certainly did not want to like her. Or be like her.
But she needed her. As much as she didn’t want to.
“If you know everything, then you know what I am about to ask,” Talia said. “I need you to hold a poisoning. Now. Not on the moon. I need to know if they’re coming. And when they come, I need you to use the aria.”
The woman began to laugh, a taunting, phlegm-racked cackle. And then she stopped and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. She was an old woman now, Talia thought, and she did old woman things.
“Yes, that’s the way it works, isn’t it?” the orness said. “It isn’t enough that we must die to protect the things we love. It’s that we must die in some enormity of destruction. You die before you know whether your sacrifice was for everything. Or nothing.”
“Orness, the city needs you to protect it.”
At that, the orness lifted one papery hand, put it to her face. “I cannot help you.”
Anger, fierce and hot, swept through Talia. She stood, stepped forth. Close enough to touch her. Close enough to strike her. She did neither.
She knelt, looked up into the face of the old woman and made it so she could not look away. “You talk to me of roles? This, this is your only role. To help the city. And you deny it. You are a monster. Far more than I ever thought.”
The orness shook her head. Her voice cracked, broke against the hands that covered her face. “You still don’t understand,” she said. “It isn’t that. It’s that you still haven’t made your choice.”
* * *
That was unexpected. The orness’ admission, the truth that threaded through her words, took all of the fire out of Talia’s anger. “What… do you mean?”
“I have been the orness for longer than you can imagine,” the orness said. Anger of her own now, flaring up, although Talia didn’t think it was at her. “More than a hundred years. I’ve been kept alive by that damnable device.”
She laughed again, and this time it was as bitter as any poison. “I thought I was important, needed, and so I did my role. But the city never needed me. It… made me watch while it killed people. So many people. For what? Nothing.”
The city was not responsible for those deaths. Talia let it go, unspoken.
“I kept its secrets. I told myself it was for the greater good. For the promise of an attack that never came. But I did it. At first because it was my role. But then because the Eye demanded it of me. After so many years, I gave up on finding another true poison eater. But I pretended. Because of Burrin. Seild. I had to keep them safe.”
Oh. Oh. “So you put them in the zaffre,” Talia said. “Where they could learn to protect themselves.”
“Yes. I knew the Eye wouldn’t let me die until it found another.”
“And here I am,” Talia said flatly.
“Yes,” the orness whispered. “There you were. You came from the outside, like I did. Those from here, they believe because it’s all they’ve ever known. That’s not enough. You didn’t believe. But I knew, I hoped, that you would come to do so.”
“The lies…” So many lies. Would she have come to believe on her own? Probably. Possibly. But maybe not as strongly. Maybe not strongly enough.
The orness struggled to push herself from the chair. Fell back. Talia did not move to help her, but she did lift herself from her crouch and go to sit across from her again.
“Maybe Ganeth can help you…” Talia started.
The orness shook her head. “Maybe once. I never took him into my confidence,” she said. “Although I should have. He always was loyal. So loyal.” Her tone suggested there was something else, too. Something deeper than loyalty, once. “It was stupid. But I was still young. And prideful. I wanted it to be a big secret, something just for me. And now it’s too late for that.”
She lifted one aged hand above her head, pointed to a cluster of mirrored orbs that Talia hadn’t even noticed.
“The Eye is watching. Always. I tried to tell you.” CROSA. Not a threat. A warning.
“What happens now?” Talia asked.
The orness looked for a long time at the orbs, saying nothing. Then she gestured. The two guards stepped forward. “Take her,” she said.
A little overkill, Talia thought. She found her own hand resting on the red hilt of her blade. But the orness waved the guards down. “No, no,” she said. “Take her to see the cicatrix.”
To Talia, she said, “Go and tell me what you learn.”
* * *
Talia knew the word, but not the place. She’d studied Burrin’s map when she could, had found others in Omuf-Rhi’s stacks. She knew the names of all the places that were
marked on the city, all the buildings and towers and bars. After her first trip to the green she had the names of the skars, although they still slipped through her fingers sometimes, when she tried to recite them.
But she’d never seen anything with that name.
The guards – she assumed they were zaffre due to their blue and bronze, although she’d never seen them before, and had no names to give them – were not rough, but they were firm. They led her along a series of paths, some of which seemed familiar, some of which did not.
“You can probably let go of me now,” she said to the one who was still holding her wrist. Some of the paths were not made for two people to walk side by side, and one or the other of them often ended up in the brush. “I don’t think I’m in trouble or anything. Am I?”
If the guard heard her, he didn’t acknowledge it. She wished she had one of Ganeth’s devices now, to send a message and update everyone. She wondered how their tasks were coming along. Hopefully a little less confounding than hers.
The guard stopped before a large door in the garden. Just… a door in a doorframe. No building around it. It was bright red, and bore four keyholes. Plants grew all around it and a little stone pathway led up to it.
“Go,” the guard said, as he let go of her wrist.
“Um… where?”
He looked at her, squinting one eye as if he thought she might be a touch slow. “Through the door.”
So she did. She opened the door – despite all its keyholes, it was not locked. On the other side, she could see the continuation of the garden and the path she was standing on. If this was another trick of the orness, some kind of ploy or punishment, at least it was original.
“Go,” the guard said again.
She stepped through the door – she heard something whir and click above her head – and by the time her foot came down on the other side of the frame, she could tell she was somewhere else. Alone. In a big grey room filled with nothing but windows. Somewhere high up, from the grey tone of the sky and the drop in her stomach. Higher up even than the blackweave.
Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 23
