Numenera--The Poison Eater Read online

  The Poison Eater

  A Numenera Novel

  Shanna Germain

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. ebeli

  MEMORIES

  The poisoning – ebeli

  CLEAVE

  THE MARROW

  II. iisrad

  SHADES

  WARD

  YOUR EYES

  The poisoning – iisrad

  II. iisrad

  THESE TONGUES

  SHALL SING

  The poisoning – onysa

  NO MORE

  II. iisrad

  EVERY HEART A DEATH

  THE TEN POISONS OF ENTHAIT

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Monte, who gave us the world

  Prologue

  Eternity is a long time to go hungry, and the newone has known nothing but this gaping ache.

  A shadowed moon circles in its chest. It can feel the pull of something lost. Broken fingers furrow the soil of the body, seed fist to flesh.

  The sutured outside-in beast pants beside it, voidmouth, its tongue a gaping star.

  The scent of fear buried in bone. The voice of someone long ago calling its name. A shivered shard of black, sharpened skypiece.

  The newone remembers its mission. Go. Seek. Devour.

  It has eaten everything it has ever loved. What is left?

  I. ebeli

  MEMORIES

  Poison never lies.

  But Talia does. Every time she takes the poison, she lies. False words are the only weapons she has left, and she wields them with precision, but not with pride. Every time, she tells the guards that she sees danger in the woods, creatures in the clouds, something coming, something dark. Not too specific. Just enough menace. For those who are looking, those who believe, there is always a danger to be found outside Enthait’s walls. And Talia is the one who finds it for them.

  She would lie this time too. She had to.

  In the small room that she’d come, over time, to think of as hers, Talia picked a small spraypen off the small table and marked a circle, no bigger than the pad of her thumb, on the wall. That one made seven. Seven moons. Seven poisonings. Seven lies.

  Talia still wasn’t used to writing with her left hand, and all of the circles were misshapen in a different way. She touched each one with the pad of her left thumb, the most recent smearing as it took on the texture of her fingerprint. Seven down, three to go. If she lived through this one, that was.

  Lying about the poisoning was a given for her. Living through one was not. Most poison eaters lived through one, many through four or five, less through seven, and no one – as everyone was so fond of reminding her – had lived through all ten. No one but the orness. They called it the killer, the tenth poison. As if the others weren’t.

  Even to Talia, whose sense of right and wrong was no compass to guide one’s life by, the system seemed… broken at the very best. And something else entirely at its worst. But it was a system that served her needs, at least for now, and she would play its game until she won – or until it killed her.

  There was very little in the room other than herself. A bed. The small table that held, in addition to the spraypen, a hexed armband and a broken blue-black blade. A cobalt cloak upon a hook. Two doors, one to the street and one to the tunnels. And Khee, the former warbeast, curled about himself and snoring lightly on a blanket in the corner, his weirdly angled legs and long neck forming an impossible circle. The striped implants that laced his fur were unlit, settling into a shade of brown only slightly paler than his natural color.

  Talia picked up the hexed metal band and pulled it over the empty space where her right hand used to be. It glowed pale blue as it settled around the skin of her upper arm. Ganeth’s handiwork. The Aeon Priest had wanted to recreate her a living hand, but she’d refused. She had reasons for wanting to remember her loss. That negative space was as important to the entirety of her self as the etchings along her spine or the streaks of red hair that grew from the scars on her scalp. She wielded these with neither precision nor pride, but with some combination of shame and memory that formed no word.

  She had not been able to turn Ganeth away from building this, though: as she reached for the cobalt cloak hanging on the wall, the hexes covering her forearm spread apart and reworked themselves into a mechanical semblance of her former hand. The transition was silent and took a mere second – barely long enough for her to marvel, as she often did, at Ganeth’s skills – and then she was using both hands to pull the cloak over her head.

  The cloak was not hers. It belonged to the station of the poison eater – those who had worn it before and those who would wear it after – but the metallic fabric settled and shaped itself around her as though it had been made for her. It had taken her weeks to figure out how to flow the fabric with a thought, but now it was second nature, a passing trifle in the ritual of getting ready.

  Ganeth had showed her the mechanism once, a weave of thin metals inside the fabric that pressed to her skin, and while she could make the material bend to her will, she still didn’t understand it.

  At the soft rustle of shifting material, Khee raised his head, blinking, his long upward-curving tusks glinting with sleep drool.

  Khee was no longer the warbeast he’d been when they’d found each other. Since the night they’d walked side by side through the city’s gates nearly a year ago, his stripes (she thought of them as his moods) rarely glowed anymore. Sometimes when he was sleeping – dreaming, she thought – they’d pop bright yellow or blue, light up the room in tiny flickers, wake her from her own fitful sleep. But mostly they stayed quiet.

  He’d grown full and sated, a little soft, maybe even a little sweet. But then again, so had she. Sometimes that gnawed at her – the vordcha will come for you – but most of the time she was able to push the thought away.

  She was working on it. Small steps. Small thoughts. First the poison eater, then the orness, then the aria. When the vordcha came, she would be ready.

  Khee stretched and yawned, showing off a row of natural teeth and, behind that, two rows of crafted ones. One set was enough to kill. Two were enough to kill slowly, painfully. Only the vordcha would think it necessary to add more. Or perhaps they did it for fun. Because they could. She thought she had some answers about the vordcha, but how they thought, why they did things – for that, she had only questions.

  Khee blinked her way, four bright blue eyes asking.

  now?

  “Soon,” she said.

  Talia flexed her hexlight fingers and the pieces slid back into the shape of a band around her arm.

  Then she bent her head until her chin touched her chest. She hadn’t come here with any gods of her own. Only the gods given to her by others, gods that had betrayed and sacrificed her, and so she said no prayer now other than her own name. Not the name she owned now. Not the name she’d been given by her former captors. The name she’d been born into, a secret name of a people she no longer remembered. She whispered it toward her heart, so quiet that not even Khee could hear.

  And then the only thing she knew that even resembled a prayer. “And only the orness, the keeper of the aria, shall remain.”

  A knock against the door, soft and low enough that she knew instantly whose hand it belonged to.

  “Come, Seild.”

  The girl scarcely waited for the sound of her name to leave Talia’s lips before she rushed into the room. Barely tall enough to carry the long flickerstick against her back without it dragging on the ground. Her cloak did drag, but it carried no sign of the tunnel she’d just passed through. Seild stopped in front of Talia, as was custom and proper, but her gaze could
n’t help sliding toward the creature in the corner.

  For the poisoning, Seild’s usually wild hair was pinned and wrapped into the shape of two curling horns on the sides of her head. Talia almost laughed to think of Isera getting her daughter to sit still long enough for that piece of costuming.

  Talia was generally bad with ages, but the first time she’d met Seild the girl had said, “Finwa. I’m Seild, I am six, and I am the youngest member of the zaffre.”

  Talia hadn’t known half the words the girl had said. Like most people she’d met, Talia spoke the Truth. She also spoke the code language that she and the other martyrs had made up to keep plans out of the minds of the vordcha. But Enthait also seemed to have its own turns of phrase, cultural threads woven through the language. She’d pulled at those threads a lot since then, unweaving them, trying to reweave them. The patterns were more complicated than she’d expected. Finwa was usually hello. But sometimes please. And other times another, more nuanced, sentiment that she still didn’t quite grasp.

  Zaffre was an easier word, at least. Concrete. Simple. Enthait’s defense force. Patrols. Protectors. Guards. They served the wishes of the elusive orness, who served the wishes of the city. And Talia, as the poison eater, served the wishes of them all. Or, at least, she was supposed to.

  Most in Enthait revered the zaffre, hoped their children would grow up to be a member some day. Talia knew Isera felt differently. And yet here was her only daughter, already wearing the mark. To be the poison eater’s escort was high honor, decreed by the orness herself. Not even Isera’s desire to keep her daughter safe was strong enough to turn the orness’ decision. Talia wondered, not for the first time, why the orness had chosen someone so young. That, in turn, begged the question of why the orness had chosen her, Talia, an outsider to the city, to be the poison eater. Or, really, why the orness did any of the things she did. Mystery upon mystery. Only a few of which she’d been able to solve.

  “Moon meld you, Seild,” Talia said. The formal greeting of her position still felt strange in Talia’s mouth after all this time. The vordcha had formalities and rituals, but they were wordless and bloody, metal and mech. But then, the vordcha were not human and cared not for human things.

  Remembering herself and her duties at the sound of Talia’s voice, Seild pressed her thumbs to the spaces above her eyes and raised her half-brown, half-gray gaze to Talia. Her mismatched eyes were identical to her mother’s, a startling contrast in their otherwise symmetrical faces. At first, Talia had thought the mismatched eyes to be a blessing, passed mother to daughter. Now she knew the truth. Or something closer to the truth.

  “Moon meld ebeli, memories cleave the marrow. Moon meld iisrad, shades ward your eyes–” Seild began. Talia waved the formal gesture of address aside. The girl was well-trained and would do her duties – she knew the list of the ten poisons backward and forward – but the recitation took forever, and it was obvious Seild only had eyes for the creature in the corner. And he her.

  “Tell it to Khee, yes? I need to finish preparing.”

  There was nothing left for her to do. But, of course, the girl didn’t know that. There was so much mystery, so much hidden ritual, surrounding the role of poison eater that even she felt like she didn’t know the whole, or even the half of it. How could anyone else be expected to?

  “Go,” she urged, when she realized the girl was still standing there.

  Seild’s delighted grin lasted only a second before she was running to the corner, toward the languishing beast.

  “Slow, slow,” Talia cautioned.

  The girl caught herself up short. After the two’s first fateful encounter – not surprising that a bouncing, screeching girl and a former warbeast weren’t the best mix – Talia had taught her to greet Khee quietly and let him make the first move.

  Seild went down on her knees – oh, the dirt she would hear about later – in front of Khee, and with as much propriety as a girl with a too-big weapon and a too-big bundle of energy could muster, said, “Hello, Your Softness.”

  Khee caught Talia’s gaze.

  like.

  You and me both, beast.

  She didn’t know if Khee talked to the girl, if Khee talked to anyone but her, and she never asked. But some signal must have passed between the two, for a moment later they were a giggling, growling ball of fur and formal clothing.

  Someone from the zaffre – most likely Isera – would have the girl’s head for her disheveled state. As the youngest member of the corps, Seild was expected to be a role model for every child who someday dreamt of wearing the blue and bronze uniform of the zaffre. Seild’s cloak, at least, was still clean. Too bad Ganeth hadn’t also given her dirt-proof everything else.

  Talia might need to interfere and take the blame. It would be worth it, just to have seen the two of them at play. She watched Khee lower his triangular head, ever careful of his sharp, upwardly curving tusks, to the girl’s stomach until she giggled and hugged his whole head to her. The beast’s barbed tail thumped the floor softly. Seild scratched around one of the hard metal stumps at the top of Khee’s head until he huffed a rare breath of contentment.

  “What are these?” Seild asked.

  “He had horns once,” Talia said.

  “What happened to them?”

  “A story for a later time,” she said.

  The girl kept her gaze lowered on Khee as she parted his fur and ran her hand over one of his now-brown stripes. Talia knew from experience how those odd striations of his body felt. Smooth as synth, but softer. Warmer. More alive. What she didn’t know was whether those parts of his body felt different to him, or whether he’d had them so long they seemed natural. The parts the vordcha had put in her felt both foreign and somehow part of her. Even now, after she’d pulled them from her body, she felt their dissonance.

  Seild was quiet, paying far too much attention to her own hand running through Khee’s fur. Talia knew little of children – hadn’t spent time with them until she’d come here, not since she was a child herself – but it was clear the girl had something on her mind.

  Talia waited as long as she could before she cleared her throat and spoke.

  “Seild, it’s time for us to go.”

  The girl’s words were muffled in Khee’s fur. “I don’t want you to go. All the poison eaters die.”

  Seild’s bottom lip was trembling, and she drew in a wet breath, the rest of her words tumbling out in a rush. “Today is seven. Today is seven. Lots of the others died this time, and I don’t want you to die. I don’t.”

  Talia was surprised that the girl knew about such things. Where had she heard it? Certainly not from Isera. On the street, likely. The whole city was abuzz with today’s poisoning. It was true – it had been a long time since a poison eater made it through seven. Maybe as long as the child had been alive.

  “Come, Seild,” she said.

  The girl didn’t, her head down and fingers still in Khee’s fur. Talia could tell that she was doing her very best to honor the zaffre and her mother and herself, and not to break into tears. It must be hard for her, Talia thought, to be so young and carry such burdens. She went to her and knelt at her shoulder, catching Khee’s unreadable gaze over Seild’s head.

  “Yes,” Talia said. “All the poison eaters die. But not this one. Not today. Not with you as my escort.”

  Reminding Seild of her duty brought her back to herself, as Talia had hoped it would. The girl softly wrapped her hands around Khee’s snout, then leaned in and kissed him on the side of his head. Khee’s lips curled back in surprise, but he didn’t bare his teeth as he would have for most other creatures entering his space. Likely unaware of the gift she’d just been given – a beast designed for destruction letting another creature bring their mouth so close to his – Seild stood, brushing the dust and dirt from her knees and palms.

  “I will protect you,” Seild said, serious. She steepled her fingers together. It was a promise gesture Talia had seen others use. In th
e gesture, Seild was her mother’s daughter, right down to the uplift of her shoulders and the strength in her mismatched gaze.

  “I’m sure of it,” Talia said. She was tempted to brush the remaining dirt from Seild’s pants, to right the carefully molded hair that had run askew, but it would only serve to make the girl nervous. Instead, she picked up the broken blue-black blade from the table – it was only as long as her pinky, but the jagged edge was as honed as it had ever been – and tucked it inside her armband. Its cool sharpness calmed the too-fast beat of her pulse.

  They went out by the tunnel door, Seild leading, her flickerstick giving enough light to see the ornate patterns beaded along the side and top of the stone walls. Talia had touched one of the beads once as she went by – an orange one the size of a tooth – and she’d had the distinct sensation that it had somehow opened up and snapped at her fingers. Now she kept to the center of the tunnel, careful not to step on the drag of Seild’s cloak.

  Enthait’s tunnel system was a maze Talia hadn’t yet mastered. It seemed you could get almost anywhere in the city without venturing aboveground, a bit of privacy and secrecy that she would have appreciated and taken advantage of if she wasn’t always getting lost and popping out some door into some random city street on her way to somewhere else.

  Thankfully, this tunnel only allowed her one path: from the poison eater’s door to the clave, the circular building in the center of town where the poisonings were held. Seild’s guidance was a formality required by the ritual, but not by Talia’s poor sense of direction.

  Each beaded section represented one of the ten poisons, but Talia could never remember which, so she’d dubbed them all with a name that had meaning for her. Here was Khee’s section, beaded in the brown and once-blue stripes of his fur. Here was Seild’s, red for some reason that she didn’t know, but the beads were scattered, windblown, in a way that spoke of the girl’s movement. Isera’s was orange. Ganeth’s blue. The orness was a pale green, the color of deep wood moss. She named each one in her head as she passed it.