Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “If there’s another way, I’ll try it,” I say. “But I’ve only got a day or two.”

  “I want to be useful,” he says very softly.

  “You’re keeping Theo safe,” I say. “And keeping him away from Casimir is keeping the whole world safe. You are useful.”

  Theo and Ragg Rock come back up the hill toward us, Theo marching in front.

  “Dis!” he declares, holding a plant before him, its roots dangling. It is a large, reptilian-looking flower, scaly-petaled and pale, with a stamen like a vicious tongue and a thorny stalk. Ragg Rock grins behind him.

  “There are strange things growing here lately,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “He makes me feel so alive,” she replies, and though I do not wish her ill, that chills something inside me.

  “Mama, dis flaffer,” says Theo, turning and waving it at Ragg Rock.

  It takes a moment for this to sink in.

  “Flaffer,” she repeats, like he is the one teaching her to speak.

  “Mama?” I manage to say.

  “He calls me Mama now,” says Ragg Rock. Her pebble eyes fix on me like a challenge. “I feel it is true. I am his mother. He is my child.”

  She puts a proprietary mud hand on his shoulder. Theo sniffs at the monstrous flower.

  “Stink,” he says, and gives me one of his beautiful, wide-open smiles.

  Telegram to Lord Casimir, Nago Island: HORTHY HAS MONSTER LOCKED UNDER PARLIAMENT STOP AT NIGHT TAKES IT INTO WOODS STOP PLAYS WITH IT LIKE A PET STOP CASES OF SCOURGE IN WEST SPIRA STOP LAROCHE AWARE OF ANTIDOTE STOP WILL USE IT TO FOMENT DISSENT STOP DUKE RIDING WITH DAFNE BESNIK STOP JULIA COOPERATIVE STOP

  I’d tell her I understand, that I forgive her, that I just want to know her as she really is, and I want her to know me as I really am.

  I wake up because I can feel it moving. I sit bolt upright, sweating. The nuyi is sluggish but intractably pushing onward, forcing its way up my neck, under my skin. I leap out of bed and run into the next room, where Pia is sitting in front of an entire roasted chicken, tearing it to pieces and stuffing it in her mouth. She looks up at me, her mouth glistening with grease.

  “Can you feel it when it attaches?” I ask her. My voice comes out horribly like a sob.

  She gets up quickly, dropping the chicken and wiping her fingers on her jacket. She grabs me by the hair and twists my head to the side, prodding the nuyi with her fingers.

  “You will know,” she says. “You have two days if you do nothing. Take more hermia.”

  “But will Casimir really take the poison out of Dek? He needs to do it soon!”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “You are not taking enough hermia, Julia. It is still moving.”

  “I’ll up the dose.”

  “Remember Horthy’s war council this evening. Six o’clock. I need more for Casimir or he will get impatient.”

  “You really don’t want me to belong to him, do you?” I look at her in bewilderment. “Why not? Why do you even care?”

  Her goggles whir, and she says, in that strange, clipped voice: “Is that what this is? Caring?” Then she shrugs. “What I want has never mattered.”

  I put on the plainest dress I can find in the wardrobe, tie my hair back with a ribbon, and look at myself in the long mirror. I don’t look anything like the girl who went riding with the duke yesterday. Nor do I look anything like the girl I was last summer. My chest aches.

  “Remember when you said we were alike?” I say to Pia.

  She goes back to her chicken. “I was wrong about that. If you were like me, I wouldn’t care what became of you at all.”

  * * *

  “How are you?” Liddy asks me.

  “I’ve felt better,” I say, and then add, “I’ve felt worse too.”

  She gestures at the stovetop, and I take one of her fresh rolls. She puts on a kettle, ties the handkerchief around her face, unwraps my packet of hermia.

  “I need more than before,” I say. “It’s at my neck.”

  “How are the effects?” she asks.

  “Bad dreams. Headache. Stomachache. But I’m all right. I can take more.”

  She nods and bends over the hermia, plucking several leaves from the small pile with tweezers. She dips them in hot water, rolls them into a little ball with the tweezers, and drops the ball into my open palm. I pop it in my mouth and swallow it, feeling the pulse of the nuyi. Let me not be ruled. My dearest and most desperate hope: let me not be ruled. This thing of Casimir’s, crawling through me—at least I know it’s there, I have some idea of what it is and how I can fight it. I am fighting so hard to be me, but how can I fight the other thing that might be inside me, the creature whose memories are buried in my mind? How can I be sure Lidari never rules me?

  “Did you know my father?” I ask Liddy.

  “I never met him, no.”

  “I wonder…if he was really my father.”

  She looks genuinely surprised at that. It isn’t easy to surprise Liddy.

  “Do you have reason to believe your mother was with somebody else?”

  “No, it’s not that. Before I was born, Ma made a deal with…something…in Kahge. A creature called Lidari. Did you know about that?”

  There’s no reason she should know, except that Liddy always seems to know everything. She shakes her head.

  “She brought him—it—into the world. Right before she tried to kill Casimir. Have you heard of something called the Ankh-nu?”

  She raises her eyebrows. “Yes—Marike’s mythical pot. I have my doubts as to its existence.”

  “It exists. Ma had it. She used it. And when I vanish, I can go to Kahge. I look like something else there. The shadows in Kahge thought I was Lidari. His memories are inside me.” I’m talking faster and faster. I can’t stop. “Mrs. Och thought that Ma put his essence in me somehow. I wonder…if my mother and Lidari made me somehow, or if he’s in me. And if he is, then can I get him out, or what if I’m really…that, and not me?”

  “There is only one way to make a human, Julia.”

  “But what kind of human am I, if I can go to Kahge?”

  “There are many ways a person can be changed that do not make them any less of a person. Believe me, I know.”

  “How well did you know my mother?”

  “She asked me to look out for you, and I have.”

  “Do you ever get frightened, Liddy?”

  “Yes,” she says. “But it is a different kind of fear from the fear I remember when I was young. I have lived a long time, and my fear is not for myself anymore but for the world, which I love. I fear that we will come to the darkest times the world has known if Casimir is successful. I have never stopped hoping for humanity.” She peers at me from under her hooded lids, and her eyes are kind. Or maybe they are just familiar from a time when I still accepted kindness easily. “The effects of the hermia will be hard this time, my dear. Here—this is a chorintha flower capsule. Go somewhere safe and take it. It will help you to sleep through the worst of it.”

  She hands me a little capsule, and I pocket it gratefully.

  By the time I arrive at the Marrow, a hot throb has started up in my knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders, even my fingers and toes. The tables in the bar have been pushed to the sides of the room, and three enormous banners are spread across the floor. Two of them are blank, but Wyn and Lorka are busy painting the third. There are cans of paint and brushes all over the place. In spite of the burning in my joints, I can’t help smiling at Wyn’s radiant face as he waves me over. How overjoyed he must be, to be painting alongside his hero.

  “Julia! I was just talking about you!”

  “What in flaming Kahge is all this?” I ask.

  The banner they are working on depicts Agoston Horthy with a crew of cruel-faced sol
diers and fat aristocrats, pockets overflowing with jewels and coins, trampling commoners underfoot. At the back of this procession, a golden-hued Princess Zara is helping the trampled commoners to their feet again, while a ghostly image of her hanged family dangles behind her. Lorka adds some delicate touches to the glowing light behind the princess.

  “We’re going to hang these around the city tonight,” says Wyn. “It was my idea. You know, the power of art.”

  His smile is so huge it looks as if it might split his face in two.

  “We need a scout,” says Lorka, looking me over mistrustfully. “We will start in the Plateau.”

  “Can’t beat an invisible scout, I was saying,” says Wyn. “Want to come along?”

  “I’ve got a lot on my plate just now,” I reply, and his face falls. He glances at Lorka. I feel bad. Wyn is trying so hard to impress the artist, who grunts and goes back to the banner.

  “When are you doing it?” I ask.

  “Tonight,” says Wyn hopefully. “Around midnight, when things are quiet. We’ll start on the southeast end of the parliament walls.”

  “I’ll do my best to be there,” I say. “But I can’t promise anything. Is Dek here?”

  “In the cellar,” says Wyn. “He’s got it set up as a secret laboratory. Go on down and you’ll see.”

  Lorka puts down his brush, giving Wyn a hard look.

  “She’s his sister,” says Wyn.

  And inches from being Casimir’s puppet. I don’t blame Lorka for being wary of me.

  Wyn takes me behind the bar, shoving a box of dirty cloths aside and rolling back a mat to reveal a trapdoor in the floor. He heaves it open.

  “Julia’s here to see you!” he hollers down. To me, he says, “Try to come tonight, won’t you? We could use you.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I reply. My joints are on fire, and a dull pounding has set up inside my temples. Liddy said to go somewhere safe, and the only safe place I can think of is with Dek. I climb down to the lamplit cellar.

  * * *

  “Dek?”

  Something clangs, like metal on stone, as I reach the bottom of the ladder. The cellar is full of stacked crates. A sickly-sweet smell hangs in the air. Lanterns blaze at either end of a long steel table, and Dek is silhouetted behind the table, holding an enormous pair of pliers.

  “Hounds, I wasn’t expecting you here!” he says, smiling as I approach. He’s scrubbed up, in polished boots and a decent suit, his hair combed out of his face. The right side of his face is still strange, too pale, the skin pulled tight, with silvery streaks like hints of scars, but you don’t really notice unless you look closely.

  “What’s all this?” I ask, surveying the odd assortment of objects on the table: two halves of a metal sphere that would fit in the palm of my hand, parts of what looks like a telescope the size of my arm, several pressurized metal canisters in a row, an empty wine bottle, and two glasses. Two glasses?

  Every part of me hurts. I make to sit down on a crate by the table, but Dek yells, “Don’t sit on that!” and I leap away from it.

  “Sorry,” he says. “It’s amazing how sloppily some people will pack toxic material and the like. Stars, you really don’t look well at all.”

  “It’s the hermia.” I gesture at the two wineglasses. “Was somebody here?”

  “People are in and out all the time. I keep telling them I’m working with dangerous stuff down here, but they all want a look.”

  He picks up the two halves of the metal sphere and twists them together. He pulls a small sliding lever at the join and tosses the sphere lightly into the air. It flies across the room, executing several startling loops, and then it pops open and clatters to the ground. He looks pleased.

  “I just took quite a lot…,” I start to say—or I think I say it. Halfway through the sentence, the pain in my joints flares white-hot. A flash of blinding light obliterates everything, and my knees buckle.

  “Have some water.”

  I’m kneeling on the floor, and Dek is crouched next to me, holding a cup to my lips. I drink, but I can barely feel the water going down. My mouth and throat have gone numb. The bright light fades from my vision, leaving the room colorless and dim.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “Liddy said to sleep off the worst.”

  He helps me up and leads me to a cot at the back of the room. There’s a large grate in the wall above that looks like it doesn’t fit right.

  “Where does that go?” I point at it, and think of the clanging sound I heard as I was coming down the ladder. “Did somebody just leave?”

  “Always the spy.” He tousles my hair.

  Color seeps back into the world, starting at the edges, but a tearing sensation has set up in my bones now, like I’m coming apart. My throat feels scraped raw, and a second sip of water tastes like blood and iron—or maybe my throat is bleeding and that’s what I taste. Blast, I’ve really taken too much hermia this time. I fumble the capsule of chorintha flower Liddy gave me out of my purse. Dek watches me swallow it.

  In a horribly calm voice, he says, “Julia—you’ve got to face the truth. I’m going to be dead soon, and you need to let me go. Take out the nuyi.”

  “No,” I whisper. “We’ll be all right. I need you to be all right.”

  I don’t remember lying down, but I’m sprawled across the cot now, couldn’t move if I tried, and he’s put a blanket over me.

  “It was such a narrow, hurting little life I had for so long,” he says. “I watched you going about, so free, and I felt as if I was starving for joy. I found it for a while, in Tianshi, and I’m grateful for that. It changed me. Or maybe it reminded me of who I used to be. If I only have a few days left, I mean to be useful, and I mean to be joyful. But I need you to let me go.”

  No, Dek. You have always been stronger and surer, you are indestructible, you have to be. I will never, ever let you go. But I can’t speak. The chorintha has taken hold, sweeping over me, erasing the pain. The next moment, sleep slams into me, like hitting a wall.

  * * *

  When I wake up, Dek is gone. I climb out of the cot tentatively. I’m still aching all over, but I can move well enough, and I can form a coherent thought, so that’s good. I’ve no idea what time it is, though. On a hunch, I stand on top of the cot and reach for the lopsided grate. It comes easily out of the wall. I leave the grate on the cot, haul myself up into the narrow passage, and crawl through filth toward the light at the end. Not so surprisingly, it leads to a grate in the lane outside the Marrow. So who is sneaking into Dek’s laboratory under the Marrow and drinking wine with him? I’ll have to ask him directly later; right now I have a war council to spy on.

  I vanish and drag myself out into the evening streets of the Edge.

  The war council is made up of eight men remarkably similar in appearance, and Luca, who stands out for being young and beautiful and having a kind of softness to him. The others are all over fifty, with the beefiness of men well fed since childhood and overfed in adulthood. They have large shoulders, large guts, pouches under their eyes, fine doublets, gold monocles, clean fingernails, brutal faces. They all rise when Agoston Horthy enters the room. The prime minister is diminutive and rather scruffy compared to the rest of them, but something shifts in the air with his presence. Even tossing acorns in the woods with his monster, there was no sense of frivolity about him. He cannot shed his terrible purposefulness.

  I still feel weak, but the farther I vanish, the freer I am from my poisoned body—from the ache in my joints, the pounding in my skull. I become like a phantom of myself, this sickness a distant thing I can only half feel.

  “Let us begin,” says Horthy with no preamble. “Gorensi.”

  A man with eyes like black pools and a green snake around his neck…no, I am hallucinating, it is only a cravat…begins to speak. I blink away the image, come a little closer
to the edge of the world, and struggle to focus on what this Gorensi is saying.

  “Three spies have gotten close enough to the revolutionaries that they’ve received invitations to meet with the girl alleging to be Roparzh’s daughter. Same story each time. They go to the appointed place, are blindfolded and taken in a hackney. Each time we have lost them in the city—there are a number of changes, and they move very quickly, clearly aware of being followed. Each of our spies has turned up later with no memory of what happened. One of them has simply forgotten what happened after he got in the hackney. He found himself in a pub in Forrestal hours later and could not say how he came to be there. The other two remember almost nothing of their lives. One of them has forgotten even his name, his family, he cannot read or write anymore, can barely speak.”

  “How horrible!” cries Luca.

  “Witchcraft is a clumsy tool,” says a fellow whose monocle gruesomely magnifies one of his blue eyes. “They try to rip out the relevant memory and end up ripping out half a man’s self.”

  “You don’t think it was deliberate, Sir Oswell?” says Gorensi.

  “Oh, it may have been, but memory is a fragile, intricate thing,” replies the old monocle-wearer, Sir Oswell. “Removing one memory with witchcraft would be like trying to perform delicate surgery with a shovel. It is remarkable they managed it with even one of the spies. He is lucky.”

  “Then our spies have nothing for us,” says Agoston Horthy, uninterested in the rest.

  “We know that witches are coming to Frayne in large numbers,” says the baldest of the assembled men. “And we’ve had letters from New Porian officials about Xanuhan missionaries passing through their countries, as well as Xanuhan ships in the New Porian sea. That is something to be concerned about, I think. The Xanuhans are not known for sending out missions, and they are headed for Frayne.”