Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  The squat man said, “Never mind. Do it myself.” Then, louder: “Iron! Cold Iron! Hot-forged Steel! Obey the Smith of Iron’s Will!”

  The door rattled in its frame, and the chain on my neck shivered and chimed, but nothing else happened. The door did not open.

  The squat man crooked his head sideways and grinned (and squinted and scowled) at him. “Clever, clever, North Wind! Point taken. The girly here is not getting away.”

  Sister Twitchett suddenly found the key. “Here it is!”

  “Heh. Right in the same pocket you groped three times. Funny, that,” the squat man grunted.

  “If Your Lordship will permit me…?” Sister Twitchett simpered.

  “Don’t bother. I don’t go into cells I can’t get out of. Not with the North Wind breathing down my neck. I can shout from here.” (He was not shouting; he was only two yards away from me.) “You, there, girl. What do you call yourself?”

  Boggin said, “Her name is… ”

  “Shut it. Talking to the girl.”

  “Of course, Your Lordship,” said Boggin smoothly. “If Your Lordship intends a private conversation with our, ah, guest here, I can step away…”

  “You might as well hear it live as on tape. Girl…?”

  I curtsied again. “Yes, Your Lordship.”

  “Your name?”

  “They called me Secunda, Lordship, till they let me pick my name. I picked Amelia Armstrong Windrose. I think my real name is Phaethusa, daughter of Helion. But that could be a lie. I’ve been lied to a very great deal, Your Lordship.”

  Boggin cleared his throat and said, “Now see here, Miss Windrose… ”

  “Shut it. I won’t ask again,” said the squat man, his voice suddenly terrible.

  Boggin blenched and stepped back.

  The squat man shifted gears in his voicebox back to a more gentle growl, and said to me, “No more of that ‘Lordship’ stuff. You’re not under me, and I don’t deserve it nohow.”

  “What shall I call you, Your L… sir?”

  “Oi, we are polite, aren’t we? You can call me Stumpy. Everyone does behind my back. My back is so large, they figure I won’t hear. Nothing wrong with my ears, though, except my ears got the same problem yours do.”

  I looked at him a moment. He grinned (and squinted and scowled) back at me.

  “What problem is that, Lord Mulciber?”

  “I hear a lot of lies. I hear a lot of flattery.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I picked up my skirt and curtsied again. My neck chain rattled when I did that.

  He growled, “You didn’t call me what I asked.”

  “I am not going to call you by a cruel name, sir.”

  “Heh? Even if I tell you to?”

  “You said yourself I wasn’t under you.”

  “Heh. Heh. Aheh. North Wind said you were a clever one. Quite a looker, too, aren’t you?”

  “Only in three dimensions, sir. Otherwise, I look like a squid with wings. I have it on good authority.”

  “OK, Squid Girl. How’d you like to come work for me?”

  “Wha—what? I mean, I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me.”

  I really enjoyed seeing the look on Boggin’s face. He really wanted to talk and he was afraid to.

  I said, “Doing what?”

  “Scaring people. If they don’t scare off, killing them.”

  “I… I do not think I can do that.”

  “Ah, come on! I’d only want you to kill bad people. War is bad for business. I’m trying to stop it. One way to stop it is to scare the other guy so he don’t start nothing.”

  “I… I don’t think it would be right… ”

  “Give you as much gold as you can carry, dental plan, medical benefits, weekends and evenings off. Give you a house. Palace, actually. Staff of servants if you want ’em—I got some just off the assembly line. Get you a gun. Anyone rude to you, tries to grope you or something, you shoot him dead, and I throw the corpse in the furnace. What do you say?”

  “What about my friends?”

  “Just you. Remember what I said about scaring folks so they don’t start a war? You can’t scare ’em too much, or they start one anyhow. It’s a balancing act.”

  I said, “I don’t want to leave my friends.”

  “I’ll throw in an airplane. Have Daedalus build you one to your own specs. You tootle around up in the wild blue yonder, much as you like.”

  I said slowly, “Your spies do give you value for value.”

  “Yeah, well, I know your bra cup size, too. Never hurts to know stuff.”

  “It’s Dr. Fell, isn’t it? Telemus feeds you information.”

  “North Wind is right. You are smarter than the others.”

  I just snorted to smother a laugh at that. “Sorry, Stumpy, that problem you mentioned with my ears just acted up again.”

  “Heh. And funny. Spies didn’t mention that. OK, Squid Girl, last offer. I talk to the little woman, and she makes sure you meet your True Love; he’s single, he’s not a priest; no problems, no complications, no ill-starred fate. True Love. Can’t do better.”

  “Little woman?”

  “Aphrodite. The Love Goddess. My wife.”

  He actually got to me with that comment. My mouth went dry.

  Victor. I wanted it to be Victor. I wanted him to marry me.

  No problems, no complications.

  “And you get all that other stuff I mentioned. If you don’t like it, you quit. Give me two weeks’ notice. Shake hands, no hard feelings.”

  I could not say anything. My mouth was still dry. I licked my lips and it was still dry.

  Victor…

  “Come on. True Love. Better than anything old Stumpy will ever get.”

  Finally I put my hand on the collar around my neck, and I rattled the chain. “Contracts made under duress are not binding. First I get out of here, get this thing off my neck, then we talk. And another thing. My friends. I don’t want to make a decision without talking to my friends. I want to talk to them with no one else listening.”

  “Heh. Yes on one, no on two.” He turned his massive shoulders and crooked his head around to look at Boggin. “North Wind! How soon can you finish up your special arrangements and get the girl out of this damn hole?”

  “By tomorrow morning, Lordship.”

  “No more playing spanky-spanky with her. No more thinking with your Johnson. You treat her like a princess, like she’s fine china, or else we’ll have the Uranians up in arms and up around our ears. If I found out, they can find out.”

  He swung the massive shoulders back and squinted (grinned and scowled) up at me. “We’ll talk later, Squid Girl.”

  And he clomped away, dragging Boggin with him.

  As Mulciber turned away, Boggin looked coldly pleased with himself, as if the interview had gone as he intended.

  6.

  Twitchett apparently did not want to be left too far behind, for she unlocked the door and trotted quickly after them.

  I blinked in surprise. A mistake. They had made a mistake in the security procedures.

  I had to move slowly (so as not to rattle my chain too much) and I had to move quickly (because I did not have much time). Not easy to do both at once.

  I took the disc player out from under the bucket, and pushed and twisted till I got it open. Instead of a tape cassette, or a record, there was a little disc of rainbow-chased crystal. It looked like a jewel rather than a piece of equipment, and I wondered if this was a man-made thing, or something the Olympians made with magic.

  Then came the hard part. What I did next doesn’t sound possible, but I am rather an athletic girl, and I had just spent a week in a cell with nothing to do but do calisthenics. I had even been able to do handsprings and tumbling without strangling myself. (In fact, I had done them more to overcome my fear of strangling myself than anything else.)

  So I kicked off my shoes, put the little crystal disc between my left toes, stood
on the cot, and wrapped a little bit of the slack chain around my shoulder, so that there was no weight on my neck.

  Then I clutched the chain tight in both hands, and swung. Up, not far enough, back down, kick the cot, up the wrong way, back down, kick the cot again, and up again…

  This time I was high enough to put my pointed foot through the bars of the cell window, and turn my foot sidewise. Ow ow, clang clang. My whole weight jerked back against my ankle; I was holding myself rather high off the floor, just on the bar I had hooked my little foot around. It hurt my ankle.

  There was a tiny crack in the window where the fresh (cold) air came in, and I could see the little gray branches of a leafless bush beyond. This was a basement window, at ground floor, and I knew that this side of the Chapel had bushes all along its length.

  I lifted my other foot. That was harder than it sounds, since I was holding the chain with both hands (so it would stay slack against my neck) and had to keep my other foot tense and hooked around the bar.

  Try putting a little crystal disc through a mail slot with your toe sometime. It is not easy.

  But it is not impossible.

  Then, point my toe, swing back, step onto the cot, unwind the chain, sit down…

  Sister Twitchett was back at the door, which had, by the way, been left standing wide open this whole time. I rubbed my feet with my hands, as if I had just slipped off my shoes because they were pinching on something.

  I smiled at her. “Forget something…?”

  She scowled, went over to the bucket, and pulled the (now empty) disc player out from under it. I had, of course, splashed water all over it, and bent the little pin that held its door shut, so that she could not open it to see that it was empty.

  She put it on the shelf and clicked the button. I had doused the thing in water so that she might think the thing was shorted out. But she did not even pause to notice that no music was coming out. She just locked the door and scampered away.

  7.

  It was later. I did not have any clock except for the sundial of how far across the room my little square of window-light has traveled. After sunset, however, it is just a guess until it was time for Twitchett, and my evening injection.

  There I was, lying on my back, idly swinging the chain from my collar like a vertical jump rope, sweeping out a football-shaped lozenge in midair.

  I admit I was feeling rather relaxed and pleased with myself. I was getting out of here tomorrow, right? I had squirreled away a disc of Miss Daw’s music, in a spot under the bushes around the Chapel. By tomorrow, if we held classes as normal, there would be some free time after Dr. Fell’s tutorial. What was Monday? Molecular biology. Of course, I hadn’t read the assignment, not since two Mondays ago. If only Miss Daw had let me get some books from the library…

  I lay watching the chain spinning, spinning.

  Back to the status quo, Dr. Fell had said. Special arrangements, Mulciber had said. Anything I learned I would have to learn over again, Miss Daw had said…

  As certainly as if a soft, cold voice had whispered it in my ear, I knew. They are going to erase your memory.

  8.

  Everything you now know will be gone.

  How far back? Ten days, at least, maybe more. What we overheard at the meeting, Vanity’s secret passages, Quentin’s discovery that he could fly, all of it would be gone.

  The you who existed as once you were ten days ago will still be alive. But the you who is here now, will be dead, dead, dead. And none of these thoughts you are thinking now will survive. These thoughts now in your head, this chain of thought and memory, will come to an end, and stop.

  Phaethusa will be gone, and only Amelia will remain. Her memory will be amputated, and she will be bewildered if she notices a missing week, but she will never even know what was taken from her.

  This thought shall perish with the others.

  9.

  The morning when we made such a mess in the kitchen, making our own breakfasts for ourselves; that hour which, out of all the hours of all my life I could remember, was the brightest, that would be gone, too.

  10.

  I watched the chain swinging out its smaller and smaller circles, describing a spindle, then a cone, then a swaying line. It swept out a decreasing volume, then nothing.

  I thought of people who might help, like ap Cymru or Lelaps the dog. But I had no way to get out of the cell to find them.

  My thoughts skittered in circles like mice, smaller and smaller, looking for some way out of the trap I was in. Some way out of the trap. Some way out. Some way.

  But there was nothing more to think. The more I thought, the more I would have to lose.

  23

  Dreams and Desires

  1.

  That night I had a dream. A man stood by the head of my cot.

  He wore a breastplate of bronze, set with figures of men and swine. His helmet was made of large square oblongs of white, as if the teeth of some animal had been sewn atop a cap of bronze. In his hand was a spear but, instead of a spearhead, the shaft was tipped with a thin spine, like the stinger of a stingray.

  Beneath his helmet, he had neither eyes nor mouth. Dried blood ran down his cheeks and chin. His armor was streaked over with running brown stains, and the gore had rusted the metal in places.

  He said, “In life, I was Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe. You are my aunt, for Circe is the daughter of Helion. I slew Odysseus and knew not whom I slew. In penance, Queen Arete sent me to guard Nausicaa, her daughter. Poseidon’s men overcame me, and at that task I failed. Erichtho trapped me in a box, as a toy for Boreas, and my spirit was tormented and would not rest; but I walked the world to and from my box, searching for the Lady Nausicaa again. My hate kept me awake, and I would not sleep. I watched and sought, watched and sought. I knew not then that the North Wind had other watchers watching me, unclean spirits as restless as myself, and when I scented some trace of the Lady Nausicaa, they fled to inform Boreas. Against my knowledge and against my will, my own loyalty to the Lady Nausicaa was used to snare her. I knew it not, but I was one of the watchmen of Boreas, and I kept the Lady imprisoned.”

  In the dream, I could move and speak. I said, “What do you want with me?” And my fingers trembled and my limbs shook, because of a terrible cold which came from the man, and a smell of dried blood, spoiled meat, and putrefaction.

  “Eidotheia, child of the Graeae, buried my bones, and paid the toll for the ferry man, Chiron. Your prayer reached me in Hell, where I walk in the bloody forest hanging with corpses, set aside for kin-slayers, and gave me wings. I sped by the fifty heads of Cerberus, his teeth like daggers and his slobber more venomous than any serpent’s and, though he howls and seeks me now, I am here. Once the cock crows, I am done for, and I return to double and triple punishments.”

  Out from the stained and tattered cloak, now he spread white wings, like the wings of a dove. The wingtips to either side almost touched the opposite walls of the cell. The starlight from the window caught the edges of each feather, and traced them in silver.

  “Can you help me?” I said.

  “I am a shadow. I can touch nothing.”

  “Why did you come to me?”

  “Erichtho set wards around Eidotheia and Phoebetor; the Telchine boy, Damnameneus, has no soul. But the music which walled you in is silent now, and that silence allows my approach.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I can bring you in dream to one who dreams of you.”

  “Will that help me?”

  “No. But you will come, because you will hope that it will.”

  He touched me with his spear, and I sat up. The collar and the chain melted away.

  He pointed to the far wall. In the moonless dark, it receded from us, forming a long, dark corridor.

  Down it I went, hugging myself in my white flannel nightgown, and the floorstones were cold on my bare feet.

  2.

  In dream, time and distance were without meani
ng. It might have been minutes I walked that dark and unreal corridor, or hours, or years.

  Or, I might have been in that corridor since the beginnings of forever and would always be there, a lonely girl in a white nightgown, stepping on silent, bare feet down a black corridor that led away from imprisonment and toward some uncertain goal; while behind me walks, and will always walk, a dead man who died in the line of duty, but who still seeks, somehow, without hope, without fear, without life, to carry it out.

  3.

  At the end of the corridor was a square of reddish light. It hurried toward me like the light of an oncoming train in a tunnel, approaching far more quickly than my hesitant steps could account for, as if the corridor were collapsing like a folding telescope.

  Then, with a motionless jolt, like the shock of waking instantly from a dream, I was there. Behind me there was no sign of the corridor through which I had come. I was backed up against the edge of a short desk or workbench. My hands were gripping the rough edge of the workbench to either side, and I could feel the wood pushed up against my bottom, through the flannel fabric of my nightie.

  The fire in the stove was burning low, but its black iron door was open, and the dying embers still cast red shadows into the small interior of the hut or shed where I found myself. Wood was piled next to the stove, dingy with rodent droppings. There were holes gnawed in the baseboards, made by rats or mice.

  There was a cot, smaller than my cot in my jail cell, on which a bundle of rags had been heaped. Beyond that was a refrigerator, two feet high. Half-empty cartons of take-away Chinese food lay on the floor before the refrigerator door. There was other litter here and there on the floor.

  There was a cracked mirror above the stove to my left. In it, it looked as if I were half-sitting in the edge of the bench, about to rise.