The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (110 page)

She floated slowly in a radiant haze, watching shadows move upon it like finger-animals projected on a wall.  Silly, pointless.  Her limbs tingled, too heavy to move.  She was tired.  She wished the shadows would go away and let her bask in that warm glow, like sunlight...

Like the Palace.

Awareness pricked her, turning the lassitude to fear.  The pins and needles that defined her limbs became fiery nails, and she jerked against them, confused, frightened.

A shadow swelled against the mist, condensing darker until she felt a weight on her brow. 
'Hush,'
said someone. 
'Thrashing doesn't help.'

Am I dead?
she said.

'Only if you keep irritating me.'

She knew that voice, that tone, but she couldn't seem to form the name. 
You.

'Yes, me.  Now be still.  This is far worse than last time.'

She tried to open her eyes but they felt glued shut.  Light slid in through the cracks, blue-black and blue-white, and within it the shadow—that familiar sharp profile.

Piking shit
, she thought, then the darkness came again.

*****

“Wake up.”

Her eyes popped open as if she had simply been waiting, though she could not remember a moment before the voice.  That wretched, arrogant, self-satisfied—

“Don't look so happy to see me,” said Enkhaelen as he leaned into view.  “We wouldn't want you to strain your smile muscles.”

She scowled automatically, and he said, “Good, that's the Vedaceirra I know.”  He set an icy hand on her cheek and pulled down her lower left eyelid with his thumb, then leaned in to examine.  “Proper pupillary response.  Can you track my finger?”

He waved it over her face and she glared but obeyed.  It wasn't the first time.  He had gone through the same tests when he had first tossed her into this body, and many times before when she had returned to the Palace damaged.

“All right.  Say something.”

“Something.”

He gave her a flat look.  “Say something not meant to aggravate me, like 'thank you for rescuing me, Maker'.”

She snorted, but then the memory of what had come before struck.  With a gasp, she tried to sit up but only managed about an inch.

Looking down, she found herself naked but for a cloth across her breasts and another at her crotch—and the rest of her cut open.  From breastbone to pelvis, the skin and muscle had been furled apart like a flower to show a red-black soup within.

A frisson of horror ran up her spine, and her throat convulsed, but nothing came.  All the pertinent bile-producing parts had been removed.

“Lay down,” said Enkhaelen tightly, pushing at her shoulder, and she obeyed with swimming eyes.  She had been in dire straits before, and the familiar tang of the ichor of last resort still coated the back of her mouth, but looking into her own guts was a new experience.

“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 she 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.”