The orness had left her chair and was down on her knees, opening a small door in the dais. The door slid back, at first nothing but a black emptiness. And then slowly, slowly, a tall device, a miniature version of a skar began to rise. It shifted as Talia looked at it, almost like the Eye did. Sometimes showing one pattern in its sickle shape, other times showing another.
The orness played across the designs with nimble fingers. Talia couldn’t draw her eyes away from what she was watching. A repeating pattern, not complicated, but the timing seemed important. Sometimes the orness would wait a beat, two, before touching the device again.
“Take hold of the Eye,” the orness said. “Keep it safe.”
“It’s going to kill you.”
“Everything has its role,” the orness said.
Talia didn’t want to touch it. She reached for it.
And stepped back into the black.
* * *
This time, it was not the blackweave waiting for her. Nor the vordcha.
It was Maeryl. Not Maeryl her sister, not Maeryl her friend or lover, not Maeryl of death in the snow. Not Maeryl of the onysa.
But Maeryl that was all of them and none of them.
Talia lifted her thumb to her eye and bowed her head. The gesture meant nothing to Maeryl, she knew, but in truth, it was not for her.
“You’re still dead,” Talia said.
“Not dead, sister,” Maeryl said, and her voice was venom and metallic spit. “You didn’t leave me for dead. You left me for rot and ruin. You left me for them.” She spat this time, and a gob of black landed on the ground and began to crawl toward her.
Just a poison dream, Talia. It’s not real.
But it felt real. And far off, as if that was the dream, she could hear Isera saying something. Come back. We’ve lost her.
“They’ve lost you,” Maeryl said. “Too bad. You’re here now.”
“Where are the vordcha? Can you tell me? Will you tell me?”
Maeryl raised and fluttered her bladed hands. “They seek. They search.” Talia couldn’t think about that, not yet. “And the beasts too. Gnashing teeth. Clashing claws.”
“And them?” Behind Maeryl, the blackweave breathed, shuddered.
“I cannot say.” Not wouldn’t. But couldn’t.
Talia nodded. She needed to get back to the others, tell them what was coming, but first, something else.
She stepped toward the blackweave. Maeryl mirrored her. “Do not, sister,” Maeryl said. It was half threat, half plea.
“Will you keep me from my task?” Talia asked. She didn’t know what her task was, exactly. But she had a wild idea that she would go to the blackweave and burn it to the ground. End it all right now. Even if just in the poison dream.
“If they make me.” Her answer told Talia much, as Maeryl no doubt had intended it to. Maeryl was as trapped by them as she’d ever been, perhaps more so.
Maeryl opened her face and–
* * *
A searing pain cut across the top of Talia’s face. She heard Burrin behind her, the slice of the long blade as he opened the creature’s skin, the beating wings as its mouth closed on her skin again and tugged. A moment later, the creature was gone, but the pain remained. She could feel the warm trickle of blood down her face, into her eye. She blinked it away, and again, as it dripped. And still she couldn’t pull her eyes from the orness’ fingers.
The orness hit one final symbol and stopped. For a long moment, nothing happened. Nothing except what was already happening – the flap of metal wings, the cries of the zaffre as their weapons hit their marks, the triumphant squeal of the charn as theirs did too.
Then: a note. Two. The city began to sing, all around them. Radiating out from the device into the city. A new song. One of woven shadow and the sun’s fall across the sky. The dry sound of dust in your hair, the lull of your heartbeat fading to nothing. And then rising into everything.
Talia had never heard the city like this. No one else had either, she guessed, from the way they all stood for one moment, faces trained to the skies, silent.
Outside the clave, a wind rattled the broken roof, sending more shards of glass hurtling toward them. Then it picked up the song. She could hear it the moment the wind wove through the skars, hollowed them out, the haunting moan of metal and blood. The song rose and rose, until the sound became storm, became moving death, whipping everything that moved into a frenzy.
Talia stood her ground, eyes closed tight, felt the sound move around and around her, never touching her. It whipped her hair against her face, the slash of her braids. Debris caught her on its way by. Blood still dripped, hot and steady, down her eye and she shook her head to see.
She could feel things whipping by her, being pulled out of the clave into the air above. Big things. Metal things. Any moment, she expected to be swept up in the storm.
She felt a hand enter her true hand. It was the orness, paper and parchment, the life slowly going from her.
“Listen,” the orness said. “About the tenth…”
“Will it kill me?” Talia asked.
“Do you believe it will?” she said.
“No,” Talia said. “No.”
But it wasn’t the orness’ question she was answering. The orness was gone.
NO MORE
Talia thought she crossed back again, but no. Maeryl was here this time. In the clave.
And yet, they were nowhere at the same time. Inbetween. Neither the blackweave nor the clave were in reach. Attor, the space between life and death.
She could hear the oily breathing, far off. And the cries of the greyes, the squall of the charn. Still farther.
She wasn’t surprised to see Maeryl here. Again. Mostly alive. Somehow she’d known, even then, that the vordcha would not let her go so easily. She’d known in her heart that this was the path where everything led.
Maeryl had always been a sharp fighter, a hand on each blade. Better than Talia. The vordcha had only made her better in near-death. They’d bifurcated her arms, added hands on the ends, so that four hands and four blades began to whirl. Her chest was open to the air and, inside it, a machine that spun hot and white, giving off smoke.
Talia had her hexed hand. Her red-handled weapon. The blue-black blade. It was so little.
“Where are the vordcha?”
Maeryl stepped forward, blades whirring. The machine in her chest released a stream of smoke that made Talia’s eyes water and pull closed. “Gone. I am their hunter now.”
“I’m sorry, Maeryl,” she said. “I thought you dead. I would not have left you for them.”
A small tsk from Maeryl. Disbelief. All white smoke and blades.
It was almost deserved, and she let it sink in, a small shard in the meat of her heart.
“If what you said is true, that you did not mean to leave me for them…” Maeryl said, “…then come and save me, if you are true.”
“I can’t, Maeryl. I won’t fight you.” She thought of Burrin, putting his fist to his chest. I won’t kill you. But I may hurt you very, very badly.
“Then you are still the coward you were that day,” Maeryl said. “And no sister to me.”
Talking to the mech inside Maeryl, Talia said more words, words about how she wouldn’t take on Maeryl, how she wouldn’t fight her, how she wouldn’t kill her. At the same time, she tucked her hand into her pocket and pulled out the sliver of blue-black blade. It was as sharp as it always was, and fit just so into her hexed palm.
I will give you mercy if you ask it of me.
While she talked to the mech with words, she talked to Maeryl with something else. She held her hand open, off to the side until she was sure Maeryl had seen it. When Maeryl nodded yes in the depth of her eyes, Talia said, “Finwa. I am sorry for what I am about to do.”
She took a single step toward Maeryl, who met her, blades whirring. “Me too, sister.”
Talia ducked, stepped away. Maeryl was slow, clumsy, the fight between the vordcha�
��s planted mech and her own self causing tremors.
“Ready?” Talia asked. She had been a survivor long enough to know not to wait for an answer. She skirted Maeryl’s thrusts and drove the blue-black blade into the back of her sister’s neck. Her strike was sure and true and deep, and when she pulled the blade out, Maeryl fell, a slow, languid path toward the ground. Talia watched her hands catch her friend, her lover, her sister, her enemy. Together, they lowered to the ground.
Talia knelt at Maeryl’s side. For a moment, she was not Talia. Not Cathaliaste, the last of the Twelve Martyrs. But something else entirely. The secret name she’d been once, before the vordcha, before she’d been given away for so little. She leaned down and whispered the name into Maeryl’s ear.
Just for a moment she was that, and then it was over. She was who she’d become, who she’d been made into. They all were.
She cradled Maeryl’s head in her lap. Maeryl opened her eyes. One was shot through with black, the vordcha’s doing or a sign of her death, Talia didn’t know. Her breathing was rough, broken. You could practically hear the air scraping over her raw lungs.
“I’m sorry, sister,” Maeryl said. Her voice, out of breath, sounded like the Maeryl she had known, once. The Maeryl who had kept her light in the darkness. The Maeryl of the sea and salt and windswept waves of blue.
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” Talia said. She meant it, even though it punctured her heart to say it. “You did everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.” She gasped at the end of the sentence, and Talia realized she must be struggling just to breathe, with the weight of all the mech inside her. It was only the vordcha’s imperative that made her go on, forced step by forced step. She was more machine than human now.
“It never is. Not for any of us.” She meant that too, more than she realized until she even said it.
Maeryl exhaled, then took a ragged, pain-filled breath in order to speak. “Cathaliaste, sister, will you tell me of the sea?”
Talia, who had never seen the sea other than in Maeryl’s words, gave those words back to her now. A woken stream of water and wind, of blue beyond all blues, of the place where water met land and stepping forward buoyed you into weightlessness. She wove a story of blue love around the body that was no longer her sister, and when it was done, and Maeryl closed her eyes one last time, Talia’s shard of blue-black blade went back home.
Once again the last of the Twelve Martyrs of the Forgotten Compass, Cathaliaste wept.
And everything tasted of salt.
* * *
When she opened her eyes, all around her lay the dead charn and bleeding zaffre. Rakdel was already moving forward to tend to them. The rest of them were standing, harsh breaths and dusty faces. The device had retracted back into the floor. She didn’t know if that was something the orness had done, or if it had done so on its own.
She saw Seild and Khee, both all right, Seild looking like she didn’t know whether she was supposed to be excited or terrified. Or perhaps both.
Softness
Khee said and there was so much pride, so much love, in that single word that she couldn’t have spoken even if she needed to. So she nodded at him, blinking back all the tears that the world had left. Which was surprising how many.
Talia went down on her knees beside the orness. “Thank you,” she said. Even though she knew that the orness couldn’t hear it. Would never hear it again, not even for all that she had done.
She pushed herself up, found Isera standing there. They leaned their foreheads together, eyes closed, just breathing.
“Is it over?” Isera asked.
Standing there, with her forehead touching the woman she loved and her hand holding the hand of the woman she would become, Talia wanted to say yes. Yes, it was over. Yes, everything was fine.
But it would be a lie. And she thought that she might be done with those for a while. She thought she would see how it felt to speak true.
* * *
“No,” she said. “The vordcha are still out there.”
“They’ll come?”
“Maybe.” But maybe not. They were cowards, even more so than she’d once been.
“If they don’t come, you’ll go after them.” It wasn’t a question, so Talia didn’t answer.
They stood a moment longer, Talia breathing in the scent of cyrria spices and green boughs.
“You’re bleeding,” Isera said, as they pulled away. “Rakdel will have to stitch you.”
Together, they reached down and lifted the body of the orness back into her chair.
Burrin came over to help, and they let him, although they didn’t need it, because he so clearly did. Whatever her relationship had been like with the orness, Burrin’s had to be a thousand times more complicated.
Burrin turned to Talia, put both thumbs to his eyes. “Moon meld you, Orness,” he said. The others, those who were close enough to hear, echoed him.
“I don’t think so, Burrin,” she said. “I think that’s going to be your role for a while.”
The moon had only just risen – Talia could see it through the broken ceiling of the clave. She put her thumbs to her eyes. She’d regretted so many choices in her life, but she did not regret this one.
Moon meld you, poison eater, and you shall shine.
II. iisrad
EVERY HEART A DEATH
For the last time, Talia knelt before the Eye. And she saw, as she always did, as she always had, nothing more than the reflection of her own face.
The vordcha were still out there, somewhere. Coming for her. Or going elsewhere to gather new martyrs.
If they were coming, the city would be ready. If they weren’t, then she would go after them.
She needed to know. The tenth poison would kill her or it would save her. She was fine with it either way.
Khee lay beside her, the length of his body a comfort in the darkness. Beside him, her pack, filled with what mattered. A device that became a map of the world. A green cup. A hexed armband. A long red ribbon tied into a bow.
“Will you come with me, Khee?” she asked.
yes.
She pushed her hand into the Eye, softly but firmly, as one might push their hand into the chest of someone they loved to save them. She gripped its beating heart in her fist and lifted it toward her mouth.
Finwa, she thought, as she placed the poison upon her tongue. Protect me in what I am about to do.
Poison never lied. But that didn’t mean it always told the truth.
THE TEN POISONS OF ENTHAIT
tursin – wind damps the lungs
caerrad – shiv upon the breath
oniwer – failure of the skin
itasi – branches bloom in blood
achad – ache in the muscles
aigha – the way the fingers tremble
ebeli – memories cleave the marrow
iisrad – shades ward your eyes
onysa – these tongues shall sing no more
awos – every heart a death
Acknowledgments
You know that no novel, no story, is a thing unto itself. It is a carefully tended lie, an unspoken promise, buried deep and brought forth from nothing more than pure will and unquenchable thirst. And so, beneath these words, you sense the hands and eyes and minds of those who helped shape this story, breathe life into it, and set it free. Thank you to everyone who touched it, and me, in some way during its creation. Thank you to Monte Cook for creating Numenera, a place of wonder and weirdness that allows even the wildest stories to take root and bloom. Additional thank yous to editor Susan J Morris, whose wisdom and insight is unparalleled; to Ray Vallese for making sure that every single word was right and true; to the entire Angry Robot team for jumping into this weird water with both feet; to Ben Wootten for the incredible cover and interior art; and to every single Kickstarter backer and first reader who made this book a possibility. And a giant helping of jerky to the world’s most amazing rescue dog, Ampersa
nd, who is surely a soul-sibling to Khee.
If you’d like further inspiration, may I recommend a few of the things that kept me going during the writing of this book: the Numenera corebook; The Book of Symbols; The Art of Language Invention; The Library at Mount Char; the Freedom app; the sounds of Brain.fm, Florence and the Machine, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Lost in the Trees, and Grizzly Bear; Don’t Starve Together; soy mochas; and you.
* * *
Moon meld you, Poison Eaters, and you shall shine,
* * *
Shanna
About the Author
Shanna Germain claims the titles of writer, editor, leximaven, girl geek, she-devil, vorpal blonde and Schrodinger’s brat. Her short stories, essays, poems, novellas and more have appeared in hundreds of books and publications, including Women Destroy Fantasy, Best American Erotica, Best Bondage Erotica, Best Erotic Romance, Best Gay Romance, Triangulation, Salon, Storyglossia and more.
* * *
shannagermain.com • twitter.com/shannagermain
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
* * *
Lace Market House,
54-56 High Pavement,
Nottingham,
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UK
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angryrobotbooks.com
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Every heart a death
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