“No, she didn’t. I sought you out all by myself – fancy that, ay?” Casually, he took note of Godren’s gun and picked it up from where it rested against the wall. “You caught anything interesting lately?” he asked curiously as he looked the gun over. It was evident that he was referring to the traps.
“Not really.”
Cocking the gun, Ossen tested his grip on it. “Too bad. I was wondering if you could catch ghosts. This is off-balance, you know,” he said of Godren’s borrowed weapon.
“It serves its purpose.”
Ossen’s eyes returned to him. “A pretty worthless purpose, if you ask me. I’d say it needs an upgrade.”
“I don’t know,” Godren disagreed, “I wouldn’t want to outdo myself.”
“It’s too late, Godren,” Ossen said.
A ring of tension rose around them as Godren failed to reply to the questionable significance of that statement.
“You already have.”
Godren stopped blinking, realizing Ossen was watching him with an unbroken gaze.
“It was not a warning when I said that the first time. You have sent me over the edge. Oh there have been little things,” he granted, “little things that burn through my tolerance and spark the fierce rivalry we share. But this.... We cannot be rivals over this. It calls for blood. And elimination. If it were up to me, I’d spill all your blood right here. However,” he said reasonably. “Since I’m forbidden to touch you myself…”
For a moment he let it pass that it was going to blow over that easily. Then, with no change to his facial expression, he flipped the weapon in his grasp horizontal with one casual arm and shot Godren in the throat. “We’ll just say you had a little accident with your own gun.”
The world stopped turning. Mortal shock registered like a cold rush of still water. Godren felt his pupils flare with alarm as he stared at the man who, with hardly moving a muscle and virtually nothing passing between them, had just become his killer. His mind went sharply blank, thoughts cutting off and shutting down, while his subconscious raged.
He had just been shot – with his own gun. What had he just finished telling himself? Safe? Not at all. Never safe. Where had he crossed the line? What was Ossen talking about? He didn’t understand. This wasn’t right. It must have been a mistake. Oh gods, it was a mistake. This dart in his throat, this irrevocable, inevitable poison tainting his blood, was a mistake. A fatal error. An injustice. He was going to die – was dying. And for what? What had Ossen said? I liked you better when you reeked. What did his smell have to do with anything?
A flashback of the last time Ossen had left him for dead in an alley came back to him. It was unrelated, just an inevitable memory he suffered reminded of last time – but he remembered the last thing he had been aware of: that strong rose scent lingering in his nostrils.
A connection jumped into proportion, but Godren’s mind was growing sluggish. Grasping at it, he blinked away blurring patches and slumped to his knees. Roses…there was something about roses.
“When you came back the other day, you smelled like her,” Ossen said. “Usually I carry that honor, that secret. Whether from being with her, or from wearing the scent I know she likes, the roses are a direct result of my being with her.”
Her? Through confused, glazed eyes, Godren peered up at Ossen, struggling to fathom why he had jut been shot.
“Because yes – she’s mine. Princess Catris Vandelta…belongs…to me.”
The fresh shock he felt at that blunt revelation hit him almost with more conviction than the last. Gods, Ossen couldn’t be serious. The impact must have shown on his face, for Ossen shook his head.
“It never even occurred to you, did it? Didn’t you notice her scent? Didn’t it saturate ever corner of your star-stricken senses, luscious and beautiful like a terrible, wicked spell of deadly seduction? You must have been in deeper than you thought, bewitched to a senseless point if you never noticed. Well it turned out to be deadly anyway. You should learn to look before you leap, Godren – maybe even take a good whiff of the air. But good riddance.”
With an overwhelming wave of dreadful insight, it all came together and made terrible sense. And there had been clues. Why hadn’t he thought it through and put it together sooner? He recalled something Ossen had said to Seth once; “I daresay, if a man’s scent is any indication of where he’s been, I’ve been granted the superior circumstances.” Superior circumstances indeed. Royal, epic circumstances, when it came right down to it. And Mastodon’s reference to Ossen having certain advantageous connections she had ambition for, also ironically what she was using to blackmail him with. Had she threatened to hurt the princess, but promised to merely use her if Ossen provided her with the convenient means to do so? Or had she merely discovered his relationship and threatened to expose him as a criminal and end it if he didn’t let her get at some royal manipulation through him?
Then there had been Ossen’s unexplained disappearances, and his stubborn, guarded refusal when Godren had ordered him up on the walls quite against his convenience that night when they awaited Damious’s arrival. He’d been sneaking off to be with the princess.
Godren felt sick and distant, but couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the poison or the useless despair he felt at discovering these terrible secrets only as he was about to die, unable to do anything about them. His focus deteriorated as his breath thickened and slurred down his throat. The poison felt cold and heavy spreading out from the central point of the initial puncture. Already, his chest had gone numb, and the rest of his body was useless. That he was still on his knees was a miracle.
“I’m sure Mastodon will thank me when she realizes what a fool you were,” Ossen went on, his watching eyes smoldering with festered loathing. “At least I handled my association with some discretion. But you – you had to be a hero, had to jump out and save the day in front of her whole company. The guards would have done the job, Godren. How dare you draw attention to yourself and risk our whole operation? And then she called you by name…not to mention she has a dart in her possession, thanks to you.”
To think, he had risked responding to Catris’s call because he had decided it was only Ossen who could see him from the roof.
“The princess of Raven City is holding the crime queen’s secret weapon in her hand. You have not only incensed me, but very possibly ruined us all. For that, I am destroying you. Let’s see how heroic you prove to be as an incompetent lump of stilled, useless limbs unable to even crawl across the ground. Let’s just see how well you can woo her Highness as all the things you want to say turn to ash in your mouth and stay walled up in your constricted throat choking you forever. You miserable vermin. You’ve been a piece of hell lodged in my side, and you have no idea how good it’s going to feel to leave you to rot.”
Reminded that he had only been shot with his own gun, Godren felt a small spark of hope surface. Foolish, useless hope – he was paralyzed, only paralyzed! – but hope all the same.
He lost all enthusiasm for his state as the cold poison reached his corners and edges, though, turning his blood thick and his limbs stony, and finally forcing him to the ground completely. He tried to resist, denying his progressive immobility and throwing his will into holding the ground at bay, but there was nothing that could prevent it. Shuddering, he crumpled onto his side and stared up at Ossen, unable to even avert his gaze as the stilling poison assumed utter control.
Waiting for that result, Ossen made as if to take his leave. “Rest well, brother. If you had any last words, I hope they fester in your sealed mouth until you starve to death.” He started to turn, then stopped and spared Godren one last look of consideration. “Although, I am not so ready to take chances with you this time. And I couldn’t really explain to everyone how you shot yourself unless I claimed to see it happen, which would demean my character with its implications: that I didn’t also stop to put you out of your misery. Rotting sounded so delightfully torturous, but I’ll never be co
mpletely satisfied until you’re dead, and by my hand.” Casting Godren’s gun to the ground next to his paralyzed form with a clatter, Ossen engaged his own lethal weapon and, aiming at Godren once more, fired another shot into his chest.
Utterly sure of his task, he turned his indifferent back and coldly left Godren to die, efficiently disposed of behind him.
Numbness weighed down Godren’s body. The last thing he thought he felt was an unbidden tear running down his cold face, but he couldn’t tell if it was real through the stone-like fog he was fading into. That was the tragedy he faced there at the end, what he was reduced to: unable to even feel if he wept as he died. He didn’t know. Clenched in the poison’s overwhelming grasp, he waited helplessly as the symptoms overtook him. The barest movement evaded him, his breathing slurred like thick, suffocating liquid into his constricting lungs. The smell of roses, taunting him, dissipated – but stayed with him in memory until his memory fogged over. Soon he lost his emotion to the same numbness that had taken his body, and lay there with his hampered spirit utterly deadened until even his one-dimensional thoughts went dark.
*
A light flared at the deepest point of his descent. Emptiness possessed him, but something blazed through the dark and blinded his dead eyes. He no longer cared, but he was held there anyway – wherever ‘there’ was. Not a place, or time, but some unexplainable state of being. A place of existence, a bubble that served as a haven when the void soaked into all the edges around him and stretched on forever in every direction. That darkness was absolute, but his mind was bright with that stabbing illumination that drove the blackness back, holding it at bay.
Unidentifiable silhouettes moved with partial glimpses through the brightness. The light would bend around them like insubstantial web, glaring in his eyes, but their presences were noncommittal, and they never ended up showing themselves completely.
Anchored in that blinding fog, Godren existed without meaning. It wouldn’t let him go, but neither would it send him back. Would he be stuck there, suspended, for eternity? And what was eternity where time did not exist?
But it didn’t last. Though it didn’t seem possible, the light intensified, flashing so unbearably that he found the will to blink – and then he dreamed…
23: Leeches
Out of the shadows of the alley, a figure materialized and approached him. Silent, composed, and radiating a practical grace, she knelt at his side. Her skin dark as night, her eyes empty but gentle, she reminded him of someone – Lea. The same smooth bald head and foreign manner of dress named her another of Mastodon’s servants akin to the woman who had healed him after the wolf attack.
At first, because her skin was so dark, he did not see the many black lumps that adorned her. But then, with a resistant sucking noise, she removed one from her neck and placed it where it could nestle into the hollow of Godren’s throat. Squirming, it latched on, and Godren realized what it was – a leech. Any other time he would have been repulsed by the little creature feeding off him, but since he didn’t feel anything anymore, inside or out, it mattered little to him.
He did not feel the darts being retracted from him, but they appeared in the woman’s slender hands, and she put them aside. Then she continued transferring leeches onto him, one after another. When the parasite at his throat overdosed on the poison it was sucking out, it fell away, and she gave him a replacement.
Deftly, she worked. Godren could not feel what she did, and only saw snatches of it, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Then suddenly, her silent mouth spawned words. They were senseless, some sort of flowing gibberish that she chanted over him as she worked – her native language, no doubt – but he was fascinated by it, having had it impressed upon him until now that these dark servants of Mastodon were mute. She had a beautiful voice – hypnotic, and he found himself sinking to a less aware rank of the dreaming world. The woman and her leeches were still there, but the alley faded away, and he felt drowsy – the first time he had felt anything since the poison had swamped his system.
When her eyes left her work and met his, her words abruptly started making sense and registering, no longer foreign, as if speaking straight to him formed a link of understanding between them.
“Hold onto your soul, Venom Treader, for your blood is about to grow very weak. Find the center point of your existence, and retreat there; it will serve you well as you undergo this ordeal.”
Center point of his existence? How in the gods’ names did he do that? He couldn’t even think.
“If your essence evades you, resort to your greatest desire,” the woman continued. “Envision it, reach for it, focus on it with everything you have inside you, and refuse to let go until it is yours in this world. But beware the danger of this last resort; many fall willfully short, their strength failing their mortal bodies but keeping their spirits attached to this world. That is how ghosts are born.”
Weakness started to pervade his body as the leeches withdrew the deadening poison but took his blood with it. He regained the barest ability to think, but lost the will to put forth the effort it would take to do so.
“Fight, Poison Lord,” the woman commanded. “Want. Your greatest desire; think of it. Let it possess you.”
A strand of will to obey swam through the darkness he wanted to drown in. What he wanted…well, that was easy, wasn’t it? It was the same now as what he’d always wanted, coinciding with his doom…
But the woman at his side spoiled it with an insightful warning; “But don’t, whatever you do, think of freedom. You will get it – you will die.”
Already halfway there, thinking of it, Godren tried to throw up walls to block the death he had called so swiftly. It had been hovering just beyond its breaking point, and rushed him at the first sign of an invitation. A broken dam. He choked, inside himself, and instinctively fought the assault as the woman’s chanting voice rose in volume and fed motivating nonsense into his head. She had a way of capturing the essence of something in her voice, so that he didn’t have to know the language to understand the impression of what the words meant. Visions poured into his mind, spawn of the vivid descriptiveness she possessed in her voice and the artistry that formed her words. A garden bloomed in his mind, and water streamed through his veins. Wind buffeted him and unfurled a pair of wings on his back, and the urge to fly overwhelmed him. Drums beat to the pumping rhythm of his heart. As the wind filled his lungs and forced him to breathe, he felt the desire to run – run forever, because he would never run out of breath.
Successfully filling him with the elation of life, of living and breathing and feeling, the woman moved on to describe beauty, adding attraction to the spell. The reflection of a lake at sunrise glinted and rippled in his eyes, then the glittering depths of brilliant constellations. He saw every detail of the blooming process of a rose, and marveled over the iridescent, fluid pooling waves of a green water until he realized it was actually a satin curtain flowing like liquid in the wind. He saw patterns – on leaves and feathers and stone, in the sky and on the water – even in the wind. Colors suddenly held such blinding, beautiful meaning, and a cascade of tempering snowflakes blanketed the world in lace.
Then she described pain. The art of her words created it for him, penetrating his numbness and stabbing him so fiercely that his livelihood flared. It was only an illusion, but it was stronger than anything he had ever felt. He would do anything to escape that pain, but he couldn’t – so he lived. It kept him awake, kept him agonizingly anchored to the world. Needles dug at his skin and soul-wrenching cramps twisted his innards. Through the darkness, through the otherwise numb curse on his body and paralyzed ability to do anything, he found his voice in the depths of his being and screamed. Mercilessly, the voice causing the pain intensified to be heard over his cry, keeping the agony steady. He wanted to writhe, wanted to cower, but could not move a muscle, couldn’t ease one relieving inch away from the anguish. It hounded him – beating him and stabbing him,
eating him from the inside out, wrenching him apart.
He hardly realized when it started abating; his body still rang with it. But it finally registered that the cruel voice had relented to a murmur, and as it trailed off into a whisper he dared to hope he might soon feel the effects of relief. When the intensity did slack off, he still felt like steam should be rising from his body, like he should be trembling regardless of paralysis. Like his voice should be bleeding from the raucous volume of his tormented cry.
“Now,” his uncanny healer said indifferently; though, the gentleness had never left her eyes – even as the intensity of her spell shared them. “Think of something you want. In the same way you just learned to avoid longing for freedom, avoid longing for relief now. Be strong. Envision something of a different nature – something beautiful, perhaps. That makes it easy, both to envision and to desire.”
Without having to execute any effort, a vision of the princess established itself in his mind. It was at once vivid and striking, capturing his focus. She was radiant – the sun in her skin and the depths of the sky in her eyes. She smiled at him, and her eyes creased, giving her features a slightly exotic angle. There was mischief in those eyes, but also sincerity. A true rebel at heart, but fiercely loyal to the people who demanded practicality of her.
Someone who, while demonstrating that truly noble love for her people, fell in love with a criminal.
The thought of Ossen deceiving her, of him taking advantage of her ignorance and rebelliousness and being an immoral influence, corrupting her…that planted a seed of resistance, of opposition, in Godren’s deadened mind. It was just a shred of purpose that called for action – which called for staying alive – but it was the last straw in this business with Ossen, which, as it sent him over one edge, was ironically what held him balancing precariously on another – that of survival. There were two personal sides to it: the opposition that had always festered between them, and the coincidental element of the princess, which they were both coming at from different angles than that of the usual rivalry. Then there was the bigger picture, which instilled more of a moral responsibility in him for knowing the aspects than it did personal drive for being emotionally stricken by them; the fact that the princess of Raven City was unknowingly falling into the arms of those who would use her. Treacherously and ruthlessly, they would use her. Regardless of if Ossen would actually ever contrive to harm her or not had he not been a victim of blackmail – Godren would never trust him for a minute, even then – he knew Mastodon would dig her claws in as soon as it fit her interests, and she would never let go. The princess would be at her mercy, a wretched puppet on a string, and Mastodon could wrench the nation apart and turn it upside down through her.
Bounty Page 18
