Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 2

  Last, they crossed what she thought of as Maeryl’s section, rolling swirls of blue and silver, like the sea. Talia had never seen the sea, but Maeryl had described it to her so many times she felt like she knew it, what waves were and how they smelled of salt, and why blue and silver were Maeryl’s favored colors.

  At the tunnel’s end, it widened so they could stand abreast in front of a large metal door flecked with ten symbols in a circle. Talia licked her thumb and touched it to the symbols in turn, saying the name of each poison as she did so. Two holes, each slightly larger than a human fist, irised open on either side of the door.

  “Ready?” Talia asked.

  Seild nodded, then raised her tiny fist and put it inside one of the circles. Talia did the same with the left hand. Something licked the base of her wrist, pressing wet and warm against her pulse, and she shuddered. Beside her, Seild wrinkled her nose and made an involuntary noise of disgust.

  This was just one reason that some believed Talia shouldn’t be in this position. Whatever lived inside this door only opened for two living hands, and she had only one.

  There were other reasons. She was an outsider. She walked around with a mechbeast at her side. A mechbeast that you mentally talk to; don’t forget that. And then there was Burrin – the leader of the zaffre and the orness’ only son – who clearly wanted, who clearly felt that he deserved, to be the one standing here with his fists buried in the door.

  The pressing flesh withdrew and, a moment later, the door clicked open to reveal a sprawling round room. No. Room was far too small a word. The clave was easily the largest building Talia had ever been in. A giant sphere, the walls and top arching up with ancient red ribs that ran from the floor which Talia stood on all the way to the faraway top of the clear domed roof. She didn’t know what it was originally designed for, but whatever it was, it must have been a spectacle, for the building could hold far more people than those who lived in Enthait’s walls. Perhaps three times as many.

  Not everyone who lived in Enthait came to watch the poisonings, but many did. They were gathered now along the sloped edges, up and up, sitting or standing as space allowed. It was tradition to attend. And, she thought, a bit of blood lust. You never wished for the poison eater to die – at least not out loud – but you didn’t want to miss it if it happened either. She’d heard the stories of the deaths. Or at least she’d heard the beginnings of them; she always tried to step out of earshot before they started recounting the actual demise.

  Designs etched in the clave floor echoed those of the door she’d just passed through. The ornate etchings were lit from beneath, creating upward swaths of pale light big enough for a person to stand inside. For the poisoning, all of the positions were held by the greyes, the ten highest-ranked members of the zaffre.

  Burrin stood in the shine of the closest beam, his back to them. He was a head and a half taller than Talia, lean and sharp as a blade, though she’d never seen him use one. He seemed to prefer a set of long, round-handled sticks with barbed ends. Likely something Ganeth had made just for him, though Ganeth hated making weapons. She imagined that when the leader of the zaffre – who also happened to be the only surviving son of the orness – asked you for anything, you said yes.

  Next to her, Seild saw Burrin and faltered in her stride. The hairs along Khee’s arched neck ruffled up, and he stepped forward to press himself into Seild’s side. Talia didn’t know if he was seeking comfort or giving it. Seild’s duty was done here, and there was no need to press her into the light, despite all the time her mother had taken with her hair.

  “Stay,” she said, more for Seild than for Khee. Khee would do his own thing – he always did – but she knew him well enough to know that he would not seek the center of all these people without absolute need.

  Leaving the two in the shadows of the doorway, Talia stepped forward into the circle. The clave, which had been filled with low murmurings, erupted into a cheer as the crowd caught sight of her in her cobalt cloak. They were cries of luck and hope. For her. For the city. Most of all, for themselves. “Moon meld us!” “Finwa, Poison Eater!” No one called her name. She wasn’t sure most of them knew it. That was just as well by her.

  Talia stepped forward. The globed glass ceiling let in the late afternoon light, hot and bright. It caught the dust swirling up from her steps across the floor, the shine of people’s faces in the crowd, the sharp glare off the zaffre’s weapons and armor.

  Burrin didn’t glance at her as she went by, but the gazes of the other greyes followed her walk to the center of the circle. Their faces were heavy with expectation, a weight that seemed to grow with each poisoning. The crowd too had gone suddenly, completely silent. The only sound was that of their breathing, almost as one.

  Talia knew that Isera stood upon one of the lights, but she couldn’t bring herself to look for her. They would see each other after, if she made it through this alive.

  When she made it through this alive.

  She lifted her shoulders and kept her gaze on the orness as she strode toward the center of the wide space. The orness stood on a low dais, facing Talia. It was impossible to see anything of her features. The crimson hood pulled over her head somehow granted her face constant shadow, even in the brightness of the dome. Every time Talia tried to see the details of her face – eyes, nose, mouth, anything – her gaze slipped away, skittered across shadow forms. At first she’d thought it was a mask, but now she thought it was something more… Ganeth-ish. Still, she couldn’t help but try, and fail, each time.

  Everything about the orness’ garb seemed designed to obfuscate the person wearing it – the layer upon layer of wrapped red and gold that gave no indication of the body beneath, the thin gloves that left only her thumbs uncovered, the jeweled tassels that shifted as she did, distracting the eye.

  Only her feet were bare. Thick silver bracelets fastened around both ankles, their pale glitter a sharp contrast to her dark skin. Each toe bore a ring of colored cloth – one for each of the poisons she’d survived. The black one around her pinky toe – awos – the final poison. The killer. For everyone except the orness.

  As Talia drew near the dais, the orness made a series of gestures – her fingers moving through the air in a way that reminded Talia of birds taking flight – and the Eye appeared in front of her.

  It was a moment that never failed to draw a collective gasp from the crowd. And not without reason. First there was nothing in the air between the orness and the poison eater. Then there was this: a floating orb lowering itself from nowhere, so big that it was impossible to wrap your arms around.

  It wasn’t that easy to wrap your mind around either.

  Depending on where you stood, the time of day, and your own state of mind, the Eye of Enthait looked like the moon, the sun, a child’s face, an egg, the inside of an eye, the black of the night. Yellow, golden, brown, beige, white, silver. Some said they could see creatures milling about inside its surface. Others that it was filled with machine parts. Or completely empty.

  None of those things were what Talia saw. No one had ever asked her what it looked like. That at least was one thing she’d never had to lie about.

  The Eye slowly lowered itself until it rested just above the surface of the dais. The dais was only a single step off the ground, but every time Talia took it, it felt eternally higher. As if she was not walking onto a solid platform, but was climbing toward something distant and unreachable. She feared she would fall, and find herself with nothing below her but emptiness.

  But then her foot landed solidly on the dais and the orness was coming toward her, murmuring, “Moon meld you, Poison Eater.”

  “And you, Orness.”

  The orness reached forward and pressed her thumbs over Talia’s eyes. When Talia dreamt of the orness – and she did, more often than she wanted to admit – it was this moment that she saw: a tall woman hooded in bloodshadow, the dark whorls of her thumbs coming to take away her sight.

  The orne
ss’ thumbs gave off a soft heat, as if a fire had just gone out beneath her skin. Her voice in murmured ritual was ancient, tired, but not without strength. She had been the orness a long time.

  Not much longer. Not if Talia could help it.

  In the blackness behind the orness’ thumbs, Talia heard the Eye begin to spin, a low keening whir that made her back teeth ache and her tongue go dry. The noise was always the same, no matter what poison the device created. Talia’s reaction was too – a sense of dread in the very depth of her being, the taste of bitter acid in the back of her throat.

  “Do you promise to serve the city of Enthait?” the orness asked. “Do you promise to serve its people?”

  “I do,” Talia said. Bitter-tongued in the blackness.

  “You may begin,” the orness said. She removed her thumbs and stepped behind Talia in a swift movement that left her blinking, unsteady. Looking at the device didn’t help; it moved at a speed that challenged you to take it in, promised you could make sense of it if you just stared long enough, hard enough. But you never could; it was so fast that your eyes couldn’t capture any single thing, but hers kept trying, skipping across its surface, grasping nothing but shapes and shadows.

  Swallowing down the bile in her throat, aware of the crowds all around her, she knelt in front of the whirring device, closing her eyes against its dizzying promise. Its movement pushed a breeze across her skin as it, too, did its duty.

  Each poison was different. The Eye made each one in time with the moon’s passage. There was an order, but Talia didn’t know it. Only the orness knew such things. How the device chose which poison to make. How it made each one. What shape or form the poison would come in.

  All around her, the crowd chanted, soft and low. She knew they bet on the poisonings, although it was forbidden. Which poison. Whether she would live or die. What coming danger she would see in her visions. If she was smart, she would have bet on herself, but she never did.

  Of course, she hadn’t told them, any of them, the truth.

  She wasn’t the true poison eater.

  The true poison eater was supposed to do more than just survive the poison. You were also supposed to let it connect you to the all-knowing entity that the orness called the datasphere. You were supposed to let it show you all the dangers that were coming for the city of Enthait. You were supposed to protect the city.

  None of that happened for Talia. She didn’t connect to the datasphere. She never saw Enthait’s endangered future. She only saw her own past, spread out before her, choice by failed choice, step by broken step. A beast of her own black mind, coming for her through the toxin.

  So she lied, made up bedtime stories of spooks in the night, and sent the zaffre out hunting shadows of nothing. She wasn’t proud of it. Most things borne of necessity were not things she was proud of. Her missing arm. The fine scars along the sides of her head. The shard of blue-black blade. But she bore them, if only because she refused to fall beneath their weight.

  The Eye stopped with a low whine and a metallic clunk. Waiting for her. Talia reached into – through – the hull of the device with her true hand and felt around until she grasped something small and soft. She pulled out a tiny pill filled with roiling black liquid. It smelled of wet ashes and wounds on the edge of going bad. Her stomach rolled, protested at the thought of taking that into her body, at the thought of the memories it would surely bring.

  She’d done worse in order to survive. She could do this. Six down, four to go. She would live through the poisonings. She would become the orness. She would be the keeper of the aria and use it to destroy the monsters that haunted her dreams.

  “Ebeli,” the crowd whispered, a hushed hiss, as she held up the pill. A few at first, and then more and more. Until the whisper had no choice but to become a chant. A hissing, writhing demand. Ebeli. Ebeli. Ebeli.

  Everyone was waiting for her. Waiting for her to be their poison eater. Waiting for her to save them and the city. Waiting for her to lie.

  Finwa, she thought, as she always did when she placed the poison upon her tongue. I am sorry for what I am about to do.

  The poisoning – ebeli

  Cathaliaste, the last of the Twelve Martyrs of the Forgotten Compass, was falling. In the storm and the blood and the fading sharpness of her frozen blade, there was nothing to be done for it.

  They had known from the beginning that they could not win this fight, that not all of them would make it out. But they had sworn that they would go down together, still swinging, their blue-black blades making one final cut of mech and flesh.

  And they all had. All except Cathaliaste.

  She had tried. She had swung her blade until her arm could no longer lift it, and then she had lifted it anyway.

  The martyrs had discovered how to destroy the swarms, bloated gold hunters of wing and sting, awaiting their numbing poison before slicing their bellies with a single quick stroke. They’d learned of the secret place behind the spine where the horned mechbeasts’ minds lived, and plunged their blades deep through skin and sinew to find the beating metal thoughts.

  They had maimed more than she could count. Killed enough that the bodies of swarms and mechbeasts piled around them. Lost enough that the bodies of their sisters littered the snow.

  Cathaliaste was the only one still standing when the last wave of the mechbeasts came across the snow. The unhuman vordcha were never ones for subtlety, and the things they twisted were not either. They were altered to bring pain and death, and always in that order. The sound of them coming, more of them, always more, as she stood alone, unsistered, unmoored, made Cathaliaste shiver with dread.

  The creatures slavered and snarled as they came from the edge of the blackweave, metal horns forward, their yellow war stripes lighting up the night. She met them with her blade, its blue-black steel driving deep. The mechbeasts returned the favor. Sharpened metal horns tore into the exposed places in her flesh. Sharp tusks and rows of teeth sank around her legs to open her skin to the bone.

  And still they came. And behind them, she knew, the vordcha waited for the light of day. In the safety of the dawn the vordcha would leave the oily ooze of the blackweave and come for all of them, the living and the dead.

  Earlier, as they had prepared their escape from the blackweave and the creatures who bound them there, Cathaliaste had stood with her sisters, finger to finger, and sworn that they would fall as one. Skelohin. Anthleaon. Maeryl. And they would take as many mechbeasts with them as they could lay blade to. They knew they would not win, but they would fall together, and that was something.

  But in the end, it was not to be. Cathaliaste’s amputated hand and wrist ached, invisible and broken. Her knife hand had slipped into nothing, numb with the fight and the swinging. Her blood dripped onto the white earth, the dropped path a vivid reminder of her progress and her fall back. The friends, lovers, sisters she’d fought beside were dead, already cooling in the snow around her. There was no one left to see her fall.

  Two more beasts came for her, leading with teeth and tusks. She watched her knife tumble from her hand as if in a dream, unable to stop its decline.

  As the mechbeasts bore down upon her, the last martyr stepped backward over the bright drops, added more, retracing the map of her coming demise. And then she turned and ran.

  She scrabbled through the snow, falling and flailing, catching herself and then pushing on. At last she fell face-down, panting, and could not get up. The snow was deep enough that she thought she could drown in it, just bury herself inside the white and be gone.

  But she thought of her sisters, dead in the deep white banks, and how the vordcha would come for them with the unfolding of the light. She should be there with them, for whatever horrors came next, she should be there. And she did not want to die alone.

  She forced herself to rise, fingers cracking from the cold, the flayed skin on her cheeks and wrist iced along the edges. She had no weapon save her boots and teeth, no plan other than a need to
lie among her sisters until the white covered her.

  She crossed the blood-spotted field. It had not stopped snowing, and martyr and insects and mechbeast alike were covered. She could only see vague shapes beneath the white and red, couldn’t tell who was friend and who was foe. She would find Maeryl, Maeryl whom she had loved and who loved her, and she would lie beside her until the end.

  She began to dig, forgetting for a moment the loss of her hand. The impact of the solid snow against the open stump of her arm froze her breath and shadowed her vision’s edge.

  She chopped the freezing snow with the sides of her remaining hand. Her skin was broken and bleeding, her nails splitting down the center, and still she dug.

  Here was Staviane, her red braids and black garb locked at her throat. Here, another sister that she could not make out, still crushed beneath the body of a fallen mechbeast. She crawled through the snow, pushing ice away from faces. Kanistl, who fought with cries of jubilation and who had gone down singing in her home tongue, a beautiful haunting sound that had made Cathaliaste cry as she brought down her own blade. She found Anthleaon’s makeshift knife buried in the snow, but not Anthleaon herself.

  Finally, she found Maeryl. Her long double-braids were black with blood and gore, and she’d lost much of her face to the grinding teeth of the mechbeasts, but Cathaliaste would have recognized her anywhere. Maeryl who had loved blue and silver, who had loved anything that smelled of salt, Maeryl who had loved Cathaliaste.

  Her tears froze so quickly it was impossible to tell them from the ice shards that stung her cheeks and eyes. She scooped snow as best she could from Maeryl’s side, making a hollow.

  When the hollow was almost big enough to hold her, she lowered her body into it and closed her eyes. She would lie at her friend’s side and then she would let the snow cover her and then she would die. It’s what she should have done before. It’s what would have happened if she had not been a coward, if she had not run.