Anastasia put her index finger in her mouth, the one she had reserved for the final part of her ordeal, then bit down until she tasted copper, her blood thick and sluggish. The pain woke her sleeping mind like a burst of thunder. She did not stop until she tasted the bitter synthetic flavor of the subcutaneous drug packet that had been implanted behind the first joint in her finger. She waited as long as she could, until the sensation of the fluid creeping slowly down the withered passage of her throat threatened to make her sick, then she washed it down with a long drink from the fountain, trusting in the superior pharmacokinetics of the Black Sun’s product. Stepping carefully, she immersed herself in the shallow pool, lying down so that she floated on her back, her matted hair swirling around her face. She bathed as best as she could in the tainted water, and felt the better for it, despite the risk.
She did not have to wait long. The drug brought a degree of clarity, and that much was inordinately painful. The world gelled around her into a moderately recognizable hell. Synesthesia receded like the tide, leaving behind what the storm had broken in her mind. Anastasia put aside the damage and focused on what was happening.
Not voices. A voice.
The journey to her feet was endless, an exercise in vanity; still, she would not face her enemy lying down. When Brennan Thule emerged from one of the curving passages of the illuminated labyrinth flanked by masked servants, he found Anastasia naked, weakened, and sick, but standing with all the composure she could muster. There was satisfaction to be found in his momentary flinch, before he manufactured a smile and regained his aura of superiority.
“Miss Martynova. I am pleased to see you looking so well,” he offered, his voice dripping with sincerity. “You must possess resources beyond even what I imagined.”
“I am not concerned with your imagination,” Anastasia responded haughtily. It took all of her will not to show the pain speaking caused her. “I am concerned with obtaining clothing.”
“Of course,” Brennan Thule agreed smoothly, but not before a moment of hesitation that was so slight that Anastasia could not be fully certain she saw it. The countertoxin she had taken was beginning to affect Anastasia, her core temperature dropping at an alarming rate. The Thule Cartel personnel most likely assumed that she wrapped her arms around herself in a gesture of modesty, but it was actually to minimize shivering. “I will send someone immediately. A chair would be welcome as well, I presume? And perhaps something to drink?”
“Perhaps,” Anastasia allowed, while one of the servants scurried off. “Something without hallucinogenic properties, if it at all possible.”
Brennan Thule displayed his crooked teeth.
“I apologize for that. An unfortunate side effect of an otherwise useful compound, I assure you.”
“You are awfully polite, all of a sudden,” Anastasia observed, barely able to keep her teeth from chattering, hoping they would think to bring something warm. “Why the change in attitude?”
“You probably assume that we have been torturing you,” Brennan Thule said, as if the assumption would have saddened him. “Nothing could be further from the truth, milady.”
“Really? I seem to remember electrodes and suffocation, but perhaps that is simply your interpretation of hospitality. Innovative, then, but far from what it is considered traditional.”
“I can understand your perspective...”
“...can you? It has been rather altered of late.”
“Believe me, I can.” Anastasia could find no reason to doubt the sincerity in his voice, though she certainly had the inclination. “You understand the limitations of power as well as I do, I am sure, Miss Martynova. My authority brings with it expectations, responsibilities that relate more to the appearance of leadership than to its reality.”
Anastasia clenched her teeth to prevent them from chattering. She hoped the shivers that ran uncontrollably through her body would be written off as an aftereffect of the drugs.
“To be frank, I was expected to interrogate you. To do otherwise would have invited suspicion, created an opening for questions and doubts in the minds of my servants and peers. I knew you wouldn’t break under such limited, though regrettable, brutality, so I played to expectations. It was all I could do to prevent further, grimmer outrages from being perpetrated upon you.”
A servant in a featureless mask arrived with a pair of wooden chairs, one of which had a terry cloth bathrobe and a woolen blanket atop the seat. Anastasia noted a certain familiarity to the color of the servant’s eyes, while she accepted his help in putting on the robe and then wrapping herself in the blanket. Thule took a seat not far from the chair the masked servant helped her into, near the center of the chamber where she had combated madness and dehydration. The chair was of typical size, which meant her feet didn’t even scrape the ground, an attribute that she despised. The second man, whom she had mistaken for a servant, she noted, was actually a masked guard, likely a Thule Cartel member. He stood as if posted at the entrance to the room, clearly if subtly armed. If Brennan Thule had meant that to be a reminder of his power over her, then his gambit failed.
The only concern in her mind was to whether he would recognize the effects the countertoxin was having on her system. Happily, Thule seemed to be in a chatty mood, and likely ascribed her twitching and cramps to the results of her prolonged confinement.
“I can understand why this may not seem like an act of benevolence, but I assure you, it was meant as such – a gesture of friendliness, even. You see, I believe that you and I are very much alike, Miss Martynova.” Brennan Thule paused as a servant arrived with a low table, which he set beside her chair. The table was set with a fine porcelain cup filled with steaming green tea, a goblet of deep red wine, and two sealed glass bottles of water. She took the mug in her shaking hands and nodded at the green bottle, which the servant cracked open and then returned to the table. At a nod from Thule, the servant departed, leaving them alone with the silent guard. “Perhaps even more so now. There are so few of us, after all, who were born into power, who know the weight of expectations of greatness from birth. You are the heir to one great cartel, and I the heir to another.”
“I have an elder brother,” Anastasia countered, sipping the tea gratefully, though the sensation of the warm liquid on her throat made her eyes water. “Succession is not yet decided.”
“And I have an uncle,” Brennan Thule observed mildly. “That is beside the point. The members of our respective cartels look to us for leadership, as they have since we were children.”
Anastasia did not bother to inflict more harm on her throat by disputing him.
“I will freely admit that I sought your elimination,” Brennan Thule said, accompanying the statement with a casual gesture that implied that this was a trivial point – water beneath the bridge, as it were. “For a variety of reasons, the Thule Cartel would have benefited from a decentralization of power within the Black Sun. When, however, it became apparent that your death would be a difficult thing to achieve, I shifted my goals. If I exercised the kind of absolute power over my cartel that I would like, then I would have skipped the unpleasantness of your interrogation. Indeed, many of our difficulties could have been handled with the simple expediency of a conversation. Since my motives are still open to question, however, I did the least I could, in order to free my hand and to quell the possibility of dissension for my next action.”
Anastasia set aside the teacup and then drank from the bottle of water. It tasted both glorious and a bit odd, lacking whatever narcotic had adulterated the water in the pool.
“I assume you mean to offer an explanation for this peculiar torture you devised?”
“Torture?” Brennan Thule laughed, but Anastasia suspected the laughter was an affectation – part of the involved performance that he was giving. She was not certain whether he was doing it for his own benefit, as an elaborate form of self-justification, or if he was genuinely attempting to reason with her. “Far from it, Miss Martynova. Whil
e your internment in my family’s labyrinth may have been an ordeal, it was not an act of cruelty, nor an attempt to break your will, but rather intended as a transformative experience.”
Anastasia set the bottle of water aside, careful to move slowly and deliberately. Her stomach, unused to having anything inside of it, much less a large volume of liquids, cramped ominously, but she was determined not to be sick in front of Brennan Thule.
“You are referring to the drug, then?”
“I refer to the entire experience, milady,” Brennan Thule answered gravely, in apparent seriousness. “Though certainly the essence of the trumpet flower plays a key role.”
“It is datura, or one of its derivations, correct? The visions it inspired were vivid and troubling, to be sure, but hardly enough to alter my character. Your confidence is very much misplaced, Thule.”
“The hallucinations are simply part of the process, as is the pain, and the isolation. There is an element of ritual – the days you have spent here were a re-creation of the circumstances under which our cartel’s founder discovered the drug you ingested – but the shared nature of the experience creates a common bond amongst all of us.”
“What is this foolishness? You are babbling.” Anastasia shook her head, wrapping her arms tightly around her abdomen, which was increasingly racked with painful spasms. “I was alone in your little maze.”
“Of course,” Brennan Thule confirmed. “As we all are, when we undergo the ordeal.”
Anastasia gasped. She let him assume that it was shock, rather than revealing the turmoil the countertoxin created in her body. She bent double, moving in a vain attempt to reduce the agony inside.
“You begin to understand.” Brennan Thule smiled, and lifted a goblet from the low table. “The ordeal is not intended to torment, though it does have that effect. All who are judged worthy by the Thule Cartel must undergo this experience, in order to ascend, both in rank and in state of consciousness.”
Brennan Thule paused briefly to sip from his goblet.
“The rumors are true,” Anastasia said, panting between words as her insides twisted and contracted. “Your cartel truly is mad. I never imagined that madness was the result of a deliberate action on your part, though.”
“Madness is subjective. It all depends on your point of view.” Brennan Thule smiled and stood, walking along the length of the room, trailing one white-gloved hand along the carved walls. “Our founder was a botanist by hobby, did you know that? He was the first to notice that, while our nanites faithfully work to purge our systems of any toxin that we ingest, the reaction to datura is entirely different. Instead of treating datura as a threat, containing and purging it from the body, the nanites instead interact with the substance, undergoing a transformation of their own. The process is slow, and, as you have experienced, painful, but the results are amazing.”
Brennan Thule was at least polite enough to look away when Anastasia fell to the floor and crawled half a meter before becoming profoundly sick. Perhaps it was inevitable, but she felt shamed nonetheless. Even after she had expelled the contents of her stomach, the retching continued for several more minutes. She was forced to accept the silent guard’s assistance in returning to her chair, and then averted her eyes as the servant returned with a mop and pail and set about cleaning her mess.
“It should be safe to drink now,” Brennan Thule suggested, opening the second bottle of water for her. “The worst should have passed.”
Anastasia didn’t trust or believe him, but she took a small sip nonetheless, if only to wash the taste from her mouth. Her stomach felt steadier, and the tremors in her hands finally receded. For the first time in what seemed like ages, Anastasia felt slightly better than she had the moment before.
“Allow me to be frank, milady,” Brennan Thule said, putting one hand on the back of her chair, in a gesture of familiarity that made her hackles rise. “I have ulterior motives in bringing you here, and for this conversation. You see, when it became clear to me that killing you was not an option, I naturally began to explore other avenues. Once the attempt on your life had been made – and your trusted servants slain in the process, an act I should have apologized for some time ago – the die was cast. There was no possibility of going back, no potential for a diplomatic solution. Only the most extreme alternatives were left available to me.”
Anastasia took another cautious sip of water, and stared straight ahead at the silent guard, not acknowledging Thule’s uncomfortable proximity. The servant finished his cleaning and left quietly.
“Like it or not, Miss Martynova, the Thule Cartel will shortly be a power to reckon with in Central. If I achieve even half of what I intend, we will be the power to contend with in the Hegemony. Dealing with the Black Sun was an eventuality that would have to be faced, in one form or another, before we could ascend to our rightful place in the hierarchy.”
“Which you assume to be at the apex.”
“As you say. Given that you are the feared and respected heir to the Black Sun Cartel, your removal seemed the most expeditious path to dominance. As you weathered the ordeal in our labyrinth, however, other possibilities occurred to me. Other avenues that might lead to a similarly desirable result.”
“You aren’t about to suggest peaceful coexistence, are you?” Anastasia forced herself to sit up, her back rigid despite her exhaustion. “Because I take a dim view of poisoners, Thule.”
Brennan Thule’s laughter was perfunctory.
“An entirely reasonable stance. As I told you, however, you have not been poisoned.” An intensity marked Brennan Thule’s words, a passion in his voice that bordered on mania. “You have been altered. The change is gradual. I observed your struggle, here in the labyrinth, your admirable restraint when it came to the fountain, in light of what must have been terrific thirst. Even the small doses were enough to affect changes to your perception, though, alterations that will stay with you for the rest of your markedly unnatural life. It was the final dose, though, your surrender to thirst that brought me down to speak to you. At last, you drank deeply of the waters of the fountain, ingesting enough to reach the critical mass needed to begin the change.”
“You are speaking in riddles.”
“Limited doses alter only a small portion of the nanites present in an Operator’s body. These altered nanites are perceived as foreign by the remainder, and are eventually purged from your system. When you chose to drink deeply from the fountain, even to immerse yourself in it – a commendable gesture, by the way – your system was flooded with the extract of the trumpet vine. By now, the altered nanites inside of you outnumber the original, and they are converting or destroying those that remain. Soon, you will be as we are, within the core of the Thule Cartel.”
He stepped around the chair, leaning close so that all she could see was his smiling face, bad teeth, and strangely desperate eyes, but kept his hold on the back of her chair, as if she were a child that he planned on lecturing. Anastasia contained her fury, and focused on hiding her discomfort as the countertoxin worked its way through her system with the fury of an untreated fever.
“You must have some intelligence on us, despite our long exile, yes? The core of the cartel, the Thule family itself and our dependencies – the protocols that we operate are far beyond the realm of what is normal. You are aware, I am certain, that we undergo additional nanite treatments, creating implants similar to the one that the Director sports, but with less predictable results. What you do not know, however – our great secret – is the nature of these implants, and the protocols to which they grant us access.”
With a gentleness that surprised her, he took Anastasia’s hand and held it between his own, bending in front of her like a suitor.
“We are kindred spirits, you and I. We always have been. Not simply because of our backgrounds, or the greatness of the cartels that we live in service of, but because of the nature of our abilities. Your protocol is Deviant – that is an open secret in Central, one th
at you manage elegantly. To keep such a thing public enough to strike fear and uncertainty into your enemies, while keeping enough deniability to avoid condemnation as Anathema – a rare and enviable achievement, milady, of which you must share the secret with me. We were less clever than yourself, and were sent into exile, though we did conceal enough to escape being declared Anathema. Our secret is not the implants or the hoarding of nanite injections,” Brennan Thule explained, stroking her hand the way one might pet a cat, “it is the nature of the protocols we operate. They are irrational, defying basic logic and order.”
Anastasia stared at him, clear-eyed and noncommittal.
“I am a machine telepath, Miss Martynova, a technopath, as outlandish as that may sound.” Brennan Thule’s eyes were tinted with an interior luminance, a well-concealed insanity that burned with fervor when he spoke. “The inanimate creations of mankind speak to me, whisper in their private language – that is what I learned during my own ordeal, in this very labyrinth. At first, I mistook them for hallucinations, but it was far from a delusion – it was the machines themselves, teaching me their secret lexicon. When I emerged from my ordeal, I was capable of communicating with and controlling virtually any machine, from the most primitive to the most phenomenally complex. When we spoke in the interrogation chamber, I made my final attempt on your life, attempting to communicate with your nanites directly, and failing. That is when my mind began to turn down a surprising road…”
He raised her hand, ignoring the wounds on each of her fingers, and put his lips to the back of it, in a gesture of courtly affection that threatened to turn her stomach again. Anastasia could not keep her contempt from her face, but he merely laughed in response.
“The solution was obvious. I am certain by now it has occurred to you, the way it came to me while you were confined. We are meant for each other, Anastasia Martynova. Together we can bring peace to the cartels – our union will achieve the reconciliation of the Hegemony and the Black Sun, and bring about a new age of prosperity for all of Central. If you will do me the honor of being my bride, we can rule the world side by side, as equals.”
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 39
