The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  “I've turned off the pain, but that doesn't mean you can go wiggling around,” he continued. She focused on him to keep from thinking about the damage and saw the blood freckling his jaw, the half-dried drops that marked his black robe, the bands of gore that extended from his forearms to the edges of his tied-up sleeves. Below them, his hands were clean, but she smelled the lye on them. It thickened the air, tamping down the stink of rot and viscera.

  In one hand he held what looked like a long-handled, razor-edged spoon. The other retrieved a pair of forceps from a tray set on a barrel to his left. Both were bloody.

  More blood speckled the raw stone wall to her right, which loomed inordinately close for what she remembered of his work-spaces. She squinted past him to a rack of surgical implements and the wall behind it, then craned her head to see to his left. What looked like a hoarder's hallway ran in that direction, barely enough space between the trunks and shelves and crates for a person to walk. Looking the other way was more of the same, all lit by the stark radiance of the runes on the walls.

  “Where in pike's name are we?” she said, then tried to cough as a bit of ichor tickled her throat. All she managed was a spasming gurgle.

  “Don't move anything below the ribs or I'll put you back to sleep.”

  She grimaced and nodded. Faintly she could feel him prodding around with the forceps in the cavity where her guts used to be, but what exactly he was doing...

  “I believe I've excised all the rot,” he said. “Do you feel an itching sensation anywhere?”

  “I'm feeling a lot of strange things right now.”

  “Yes, but are any of them an itch?”

  “If you mean do they feel like I'm being devoured by an akarriden rotblade, then no.”

  Enkhaelen pursed his lips and scratched his chin with a thumb. His black hair was tied back tight, the unruly front strands pinned down by silver clips, and in this light his eyes looked more like metal than ice. He kicked something under the fold-out table that made a horrible sloshing sound and said, “You're stable, then. Next, we get you a new body.”

  “What? No!”

  “Pardon me? I have just excised sixty percent of your abdominal muscles, eighty percent of your obliques, several extremely important tendons, every organ from your liver to your ovaries—and don't get me started on the intestines...”

  “That doesn't mean I'm—“

  “The only reason I haven't cut into your spine is the automatic defensive wall your threads made.” He took a theatrical breath, exhaled, and continued, “Vedaceirra. You have recuperated from many things; I realize that. In normal circumstances, I would have replacement muscles on hand to see you through, or your bracer could spin you a whole artificial torso. But I have recently jettisoned my stock, and you do not have time to regrow yourself.”

  She glared at him, angry in her powerlessness—in her weakness and stupidity for running right onto Erevard's sword. “You put me in this one, so fix it.”

  “If this is a vanity issue, let me tell you, you're not pretty right now.”

  “Asshole, you—“

  “Why must people always argue with me?” He swept the air with the spoon-like implement, sending flecks of blood onto the wall. “Oh no, I can't possibly follow the rules or deal with the consequences, I'm so much smarter than the man who made me! I must whine and curse at him until he bends the laws of reality to obey!”

  “You're a mage. That's what you do.”

  “Yes, a mage, not a miracle-worker. I cannot spin something out of nothing. And I don't have piking time to argue with you—I barely had time to get to you before the rot contaminated your threads, so—“

  “How did you find me?”

  “I shaped you, Vedaceirra. I made your bracer by hand. You think I can't track my own work?”

  “And you just decided to show up right then?”

  “I felt you fraying and thought you might not want to die.”

  She stared up at him: the childish, irascible man who had dragged her, ruined, from the Palace's belly and sharpened her into a blade. The savior whom she resented, mistrusted—whom she had hated from the moment he released her back into the world. He was the reason she still had this sorry excuse for a life, the reason she had crossed Cob's path and stumbled.

  It was difficult to show gratitude when she regretted all she'd done.

  “Thanks,” she made herself mutter, “but if it's a choice between death and a new body...”

  “You don't even like that one. I know your preference: six-foot-plus and built to smash walls. You can have it again. In fact, it's for the best.”

  “No.”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Fix. This. One.”

  “But why?”

  She opened her mouth, then recognized the words welling up and hesitated. All her life, she had striven to be independent—of her family, of the will of the Palace and the Armies—but that had changed. It hurt her to admit it.

  “Cob... He knows me like this,” she said faintly. “He knows what I am, and how I work. If I get a new body, he won't be happy.”

  “Are you sleeping with him now?”

  She almost spat. “What?”

  “Why else would your body—“

  “He knows I have to kill someone to take theirs!”

  Enkhaelen stared down at her, blinking slowly. “Oh. Morals.”

  “Yes, morals!”

  “I remember those. Well, I'll just transplant your face.”

  “No!”

  “I promise you, I'm very good at reworking bone structure. Though actually, perhaps I should transplant the whole head... No, you've got that cochlear damage.”

  “The damage doesn't matter,” she snarled. “He knows me as this. If I change... I'm on thin ice with him already. We're barely still friends. I don't want to...”

  She swallowed and turned her face toward the wall. It was stupid to have emotions now. The threat had always been there, from the moment she became his keeper, that one day he would learn what she was and turn on her. That he would recognize her face for a mask and be horrified by the monster behind it. Even having it happen did not remove the fear of a final repudiation. He was the only thing that kept her here.

  For a time, all was silence. Then Enkhaelen said, “You're tired, aren't you.”

  Tears stung her eyes. She bit her lip, and said, “Yes.”

  “Tired of all this foolish business. This servitude. These endless years, caught in a trap of your own making.”

  She managed to raise a hand to wipe at her eyes. All this time spent doing the Empire's bidding so that she could terrorize her abusers in her off-time... Stupid and pointless. What had she gotten from it but a mouthful of bitterness?

  “Vedaceirra...what if he dies?”

  Her heart contracted at the thought. “No.”

  “It's not impossible. Not even unlikely. The Guardian hasn't been stable in a while. And you and I both know the dangers of the Palace. If he—“

  “Stop talking and fix me!” she shouted, making another attempt to sit up. She managed to get her elbows beneath her, though moving her arms at the shoulder was weird—too loose, like a pulley system missing a rope. “I don't care what you have to do, just stop pissing about!”

  His jaw clenched, and she remembered that he was as bad at taking orders as she was. But he lifted his hands in an attitude of surrender and said, “I'll see what I have.”

  For a while, then, she lay bored as he trekked up and down the narrow chamber, rummaging through boxes and unsealing jars, rearranging stacks of crystals and unspooling wires and contemplating skeletal fragments. Finally, he pulled out another small folding table and placed a cube of obsidian the size of his head on it.

  “I'm doing this with the understanding that you don't care how it looks, only that it works,” he said. When she nodded, he tapped the top of the cube, and the obsidian rippled away to expose its contents.

  From the corner of her eye sh
e saw them, writing and rising from their casing. White Palace filaments seeking a host.

  “I was using these for testing,” he said, snagging one with his forceps and reeling it out, “but all things considered, I might as well use them up. First, I am going to splice these to your current threads—which, I want to point out, broke themselves off short before they could be tainted, thanks to my splendid design. If the threads bind, I'll then build a framework for muscle, strengthen your diaphragm, maybe plate you internally. Though that might cause balance issues. Mental note to investigate lightweight armored organ surrogates...”

  “Focus, Enkhaelen.”

  “Yes, yes.” Plucking the thread from the forceps with a smaller set of tweezers, he leaned into her open abdominal cavity, his other hand clasping over her bracer. The touch of his fingers sent an electric shiver through her entire being, and she clenched her jaw and struggled not to squirm as he sifted through her component threads.

  “There,” he said after a moment, and she felt a broken strand unfurl from where it had withdrawn into the muscles of her diaphragm. Dimly she wondered if this was what people with parasites felt: a strange tenebrous motion, unauthorized, uncomfortable.

  “Should bind automatically,” he mumbled. Something touched the raw edge of the thread. A sour taste bloomed in her mouth, a fizz of biological static—and then abruptly she felt the whole long reel of the new material, all its twists and coils and kinks.

  “That's just the first one,” said Enkhaelen, “so keep still, it may take a while. You had to do this now, didn't you? So close to end-game, when I had so many other things to do.”

  Her brows perked at 'end-game'. “Well, I apologize if this was inconvenient, oh great Maker. I'll be sure to schedule my near-death better next time.”

  “See that you do.”

  “And what sort of game are you preparing for? I didn't think the Emperor approved of anything else going on during his Holy Festivals.”

  “Just a side bet. I'm not much for the Festival myself. Though I'm concerned at how my game-pieces have been dragging their feet.”

  She eyed his profile. For all that he wore the appearance of life, she knew how much of an act it must be. It was difficult enough for her to operate her own stolen bodies naturally, and they were still alive. Every expression he made, every word he said, was a conscious choice. So for him to mention that...

  It's a warning. The Emperor knows we're coming.

  Shit. I have to get to Cob. We can still back out of this.

  “Calm yourself, Vedaceirra. I can't connect your threads when they're wriggling.”

  She sucked in air through her teeth but felt no calmer for it. There was no pain and no real weariness; he had probably infused her with energy, like she did to herself with Serindas, but it left her wide awake, restless, nervous.

  Thinking of the blade... “Serindas. Did you lose him?”

  “No, he's right here.” Enkhaelen gestured vaguely rightward, and she spotted the akarriden blade in its sheath on a weapon rack, nestled among a variety of sigil-etched swords, crystalline maces, lacquered wooden knives and more esoteric items. No others were akarriden.

  “Fished you both out of the swamp despite my better judgment,” he said. “You were lucky your opponent didn't care to do the same. But then, I suppose he lost sight of you. There was a good inch of sediment on top of you by the time I got there.”

  “We kicked up a bit of muck.”

  “I had to burn your clothes. But never fear, I have spares.”

  “What am I, your dress-up doll?”

  He tilted his head slightly. “Aren't you?”

  Her hands fisted. “No. No, you asshole, I am not. I'm done with you sticking me in whatever body you like, dictating how I look—“

  “When have I ever done that?”

  “This very body!”

  “Yes...well, that's only one time.”

  “And the Silverton assignment—“

  “Emphasis on assignment. As in, a specific objective to complete, which required a specific skin. Are you angry that I fetched it for you instead of letting you get it yourself? Because I don't see a reason to piss around about that.”

  “I was more than competent enough to—“

  “Maybe, but it was quicker since I helped.”

  “I don't need your help!”

  “No?”

  “I—“ She hesitated, tamping down on her anger. “Obviously I do, sometimes, but I'd like the opportunity to ask for it instead of having it forced on me. This time is fine; I would have called on you if I knew how. But when you 'rescued' me in the Mist Forest...”

  Enkhaelen rolled his eyes. “The Mist Forest, where you did nothing but lay there still hooked to a corpse. Oh yes, it certainly looked like you were helping yourself.”

  “I would have. Given time.”

  “We don't have the luxury of time, Vedaceirra. Yes, I was abrupt with you, and yes, I didn't ask what body you would like, but you were moping—“

  “I was not.”

  “—and I couldn't let that get in my way.”

  “Fine, but you could at least have put me in a male body.”

  “I was thinking of Cob. He'd already killed you once, and you never had much chance of fooling the Guardian. But if you were female, I suspected he'd hesitate before killing you again.”

  “You did it to protect me?”

  “Isn't that what I just said?”

  She thought of the confrontation on the hill outside the caravan-shelter. She had been near death already, her muscles freezing despite the ichor, but even without that handicap she knew she would have let Cob kill her. And she had seen the indecision in his eyes, the anger and disappointment. Had her body's gender tipped the scales?

  “We did the same thing when we chose Darilan,” said Enkhaelen. “To be nonthreatening to the boy.”

  “Pike you,” she muttered.

  “You're the one who refused a new body.”

  “He'd never forgive me.”

  “We can forgive terrible things when they're done by those we love.”

  “He doesn't love me. We're not even friends anymore, not really. Plus he's with that Trifolder bitch. There's something wrong about her.”

  “Oh?”

  About to launch into a tirade, Dasira checked herself. She was speaking to the enemy. Even if he had come to her rescue, even if he was mending her, the whole point of this excursion was to find his true self and kill him—and Fiora was necessary to that. Whatever strangeness Dasira saw in the girl's talents, she couldn't reveal them; it would endanger Cob.

  “I just... It feels like she went for him deliberately,” she covered lamely.

  Enkhaelen arched a brow but did not comment, and she flushed, realizing how jealous she must sound. “I just don't want him to get hurt,” she said.

  “Of course not. You think of him as a son.”

  Her chest constricted, and she blinked rapidly.

  “In a way, I suppose I do too,” continued the necromancer. “We made him who he is, you and I. By accident, by force, by example, we shaped that idiot boy, and what he does in the next few days is a reflection of us. I hope he's learned what we— What I never managed to understand. I hope he lives. But I don't expect it.”

  He sounded so subdued that she almost couldn't credit it. Forty-five years of working together and not once had she seen him sad. But the expression on his face was dead—not even trying—and his words held the weight of truth.

  “You're tired too,” she said.

  The brief, sober look he gave her was all the confirmation she needed.

  After that, they lapsed into silence, him working and her mulling over what this meant. She knew little of his life, only what Cob had explained about the manor: a lost daughter, a dead wife, a vendetta against the world. How that translated into what he was now, she could not fathom, but four hundred years explained some.

  For the first time, she wanted to ask. Not because it would gi
ve her some kind of advantage in the upcoming battle, but because he'd always been an enigma—first as a rescuer then as a distant employer, off in his own world. And she'd been tangled up in her own issues. Her petty revenge.

  Now he was the only one left. Her family had renounced her—and most of them were gone, the te'Navrin clan now full of strangers. Her lagalaina 'sisters' were dead and discarded, except for Anniavela who hated her. Prince Kelturin, she had betrayed. Cob, she had lost. Cob's friends...

  Out of all of them, maybe Lark would choose her over him. But she couldn't drag that girl into her sordid life.

  Only Enkhaelen was here. Only Enkhaelen had ever saved her.

  She couldn't thank him.

  But she could end the pain.

  Finally, the last threads merged and Enkhaelen drew back with a sigh. “Now we just let it synchronize and start recreating the muscle. The organs can wait; you'll be lighter this way.”

  Dasira eyed him. “Will I be able to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Will I still need to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why in blazes would you—“

  “This is Palace material,” he said sternly. “The more of it you contain, the more you're bound to its will.”

  “I am Palace material!” she said, raising her bracered arm.

  He pushed it back down, and again the electric tingle went through her, making her toes twitch. “I crafted this carefully,” he said. “It has the minimum number of strands needed to let the Palace recognize you; all the rest are of my own design. You are far more mine than his.”

  “I'm a prototype. I know. But—“

  “You don't feel his influence like the others do. My work buffers you. Kelturin too; when I made him, I gave him the same gift. Maybe it was a curse instead, but if you take too much of this stuff into you, you'll be as tied to the Palace as the rest of them.”

  Her resolve wavered. To stay with Cob, she needed to keep this body. But to keep this body, she would risk turning on him...

  “I know how you feel,” said Enkhaelen. “But things change no matter how fiercely we clutch at them. The world doesn't wait for us. I've tried to fix what I did—to make something better, brighter, beyond me yet still mine...