Numenera--The Poison Eater Page 3

  A flare of yellow light and the low snort of a mechbeast stopped her from falling into stillness. She wasn’t afraid, although she should have been. She was shamed and heartsick and aching, but she was not afraid.

  The mechbeast in front of her was barely able to stand, one foreleg bent at a bad angle. As she watched from her hollow in the snow, its stripes went dead of light, becoming a brown wash against its hide. One of its mechanical horns had been ripped away, leaving only blood and wires along the stump. The other horn hung crookedly, connected only by frazzled wires that sparked and sputtered.

  The beast tried to scramble to a stand and gave a quiet exhale of pain, its labored breath scattering the bloodied snow around its muzzle like pink petals.

  She was sorry she’d let her knife fall so long ago. It was the only true succor she could have given. Even monsters deserved that kindness at the end.

  “I can’t help you,” she said. And her voice was cracked with frost. “I can’t even help myself. Kill me if you’re going to.”

  The creature’s stripes flared, a new wash of yellow across the snow.

  wait.

  The plea felt like a horn being blown in the space of her chest, and it took her a long moment to figure out that it had come from the creature. Some light still shone blue behind the casings of its eyes as it turned its gaze upon her. There was something… under there… beneath what the vordcha had made it.

  help.

  It was both an offer and a request.

  “No. They will come,” she said. “And you will become theirs again.”

  They were already coming. The sky was growing light. The snow was brightening beneath her.

  The creature raised its bad back leg, and aimed it at the dangling horn. She could hear the crack of the already damaged leg bone as it struck the mech, and then the creature’s pained breath. The wires in the horn sparked again, hissing as snow fell upon them.

  The vordcha built their beasts up for war, just as they built their martyrs up for memory. Tusks. Horns. Heads. Hands. The arm she’d cut away throbbed with the echo of what it had been.

  “Wait,” she said. Her voice no more than a puff of air and yet the creature stilled.

  She raised herself to her knees and dug in the snow with different purpose now, fingers cracked and freezing, the wounds that had begun to scab over breaking open to trail blood across her skin. She cut her fingers on Maeryl’s blade when she found it, a slice so quick and fast that she wouldn’t have noticed if not for the new gush of blood. Its warmth was welcome, if temporary.

  The blood and snow made the work slippery. One-handed, Cathaliaste worked to open the frozen fingers of her friend, but Maeryl had courage. Maeryl had swung until her end, clutching the base of her blade tight in her fisted fingers.

  Cathaliaste whispered an apology and broke the fingers of her friend, her sister, her love, one after the other, until she could pull the blade from Maeryl’s shattered fist. The curved metal was coated in a sheen of frost and blood, but it was unbroken.

  She felt like she should say something, but she didn’t know any prayers or words of succor other than those forced upon her by the vordcha, and she would not despoil her friend’s death with that. So she leaned down, hobbled and stilted by cold and loss, and kissed the frosted, torn face of the one she had loved. She whispered one single word, a promise greater than any other she had made.

  She raised her gaze to the creature before her. It hadn’t moved, other than to shift the weight off its bad leg.

  “I will help you,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, but she felt the weight of its truth in her chest.

  The two eyed each other across the snow. We are two wild beasts, Cathaliaste thought. Made in the likeness of our creators.

  yes.

  She crawled forward, slowly, on her knees. The creature gave up all pretense of standing, sending a spray of bloodied snow up into Cathaliaste’s eyes and mouth as it let itself fall. The creature closed its eyes. She hadn’t realized how much light the stripes gave off until they were extinguished and she found herself in the dark.

  “I can’t see,” she said.

  Stripes of blue flared along the creature’s sides. She’d seen them turn orange for fighting, and yellow just before. But never this turquoise. It blinded her and she blinked away the spots in her vision.

  “I will give you mercy if you ask it of me,” she said.

  The hollow in her chest waited for an answer that came only as silence.

  She had never touched a mechbeast other than in fight and fear. Her fist wanted to grip the blade, to beat and batter, to destroy. She tightened her hand around her friend’s blade, unable to move.

  The creature made the decision for her, pushing its head into her makeshift lap. She gasped at the heat of it. Even covered in a layer of snow and gore, the short fur was soft, plush. The remaining horn was half scored, a jagged cut that left it hanging by wires and mech. There was no blood or living tissue inside, but she knew it pained the creature. And her next act would do more so.

  She had no idea how to do it. With both hands, she could have taken hold of the horn’s end and cut with the other hand. With one hand, she needed something to shore the horn against. She shifted, until the broken horn lay flat against her lap, its curve along the top of her thigh.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  She had been a survivor long enough to know not to wait for an answer. She drew the blade down through the air, the effort punctuated by her own low grunt.

  The blade broke through the horn and wires and sliced through the top of her thigh. She’d known that was a risk and still the pain surprised her into forgetting. It wasn’t the worst pain she’d faced in the long night, but it was the pain that made her realize that she had decided to live. There was an anguish in that far beyond the way her skin and muscle split beneath the blade’s press, and it was that which pushed the howl from her lips. The creature howled, too, a mournful cry that swept like wind through her chest.

  The blade in her hand was broken. She dropped it into the snow. There was steel inside her, a jagged piece of cold embedded in the flesh, but she couldn’t grasp it with her frozen fingers.

  The horn, at least, had broken clean through. She watched the creature nudge at it, and realized that the snow was lightening.

  Cathaliaste lifted her eyes to the horizon. It was dawn. The vordcha would come. She would not die at their hands again.

  “Can you move?” she asked the creature.

  It stood and took a single step by way of answer. She matched it, impossibly, her muscles driven by something deep and new. Not fear. Not the desire to live. Not even grief. It was something she had no name for. Not yet.

  As dawn broke, Cathaliaste, the last of the Twelve Martyrs of the Forgotten Compass, rose and began to walk north with a mechbeast at her side.

  * * *

  Talia woke from the poisonings nearly alone. Bed. Body. The ache of ice against her skin. A sense of thirst. A sense of sick. The lie she was about to tell clogging the back of her throat like the pit of a fruit.

  Every time, she wondered if she could do it all again.

  Every time, she decided no.

  Then yes.

  It was hard after to tell what was real, what was now. Shaking the blackhang of memory. Her everything was filled with then – the bloodied hollow in the snow, the fevered ache of her missing arm, Maeryl’s fingers snapping inside her own.

  Maeryl. There was something in the poison dream that she’d seen about her friend. A detail. A missing piece. But what? She couldn’t grasp it. It was like the dream was more detailed than it had been in real life. More detailed, but at the same time, full of things she had missed. She tried to see it again, to visualize herself down on her knees in the snow, Maeryl’s cold fingers beneath her own but… there was nothing. It was sliding away. And she had more pressing things. Like preparing herself for Burrin. Focus.

  Her whole body was dirt and dust. Even h
er eyes were full of desert, gritted shut, starred with pressure. After a moment, she could feel the rough blanket beneath her, sense her hand clenching, the knuckles aching. She knew this bed, this sideways light that flickered through her eyelids, the scent of her own body’s toil and, softer, the acrid taste of the Painter’s colors at the back of her throat.

  She’d survived. Seven down, three to go.

  She opened her eyes. Standing at the side of her bed, the Painter was staring at her. When he realized she was alive, he exhaled, a soft, low sound filled with disappointment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Or tried to say. The words died on the dead muscle of her tongue and sank to the back of her breath. It was what she tried to say every time.

  And the Painter, every time, merely nodded and said very solemnly, “Perhaps next time.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, her voice coming back midway through the word, although she knew what she was saying wasn’t true. There was something wrong with her. Or, perhaps in this case, right. Whatever horrors the vordcha had put inside her, they had remade her into something that was more than or less than human. She’d pulled out their mech piece by piece, but she couldn’t undo the changes it had wrought inside her. It was the only reason she could find for why she kept surviving the poisonings without being the true poison eater.

  The Painter wasn’t entirely human either. Too long a face, and when you looked at him for more than a few seconds, his angles seemed off, as if he was put together by someone who didn’t understand humans. He had only three thin fingers on each hand, the ends of which were frilled like brushes and covered in the colors he’d been mixing, sitting here waiting for her to die.

  “Nice brown,” she said.

  “Your eyes,” he said.

  He was right.

  She watched him pack up his paints and his disappointment, placing them side by side in a tiny box that rested on top of a wheeled device full of tubes and wires. The device was for her – for dead her. The first time she’d woken here, the Painter had told her that if she had died, he would have been able to use the device to drain the fat and marrow from her, and give her immortality in his paint. He’d been so kind, and so very sad, that for a moment she almost felt bad that she’d survived. By now, disappointing the Painter was just part of the ritual, another step in this dance to be carefully followed.

  “Next time, perhaps you’ll die and I shall be blessed to shine you eternal on the mekalan,” the Painter said as he swung the door open.

  “Perhaps you shall,” she agreed. Although she had no intention of becoming part of his painted wall of the dead.

  After he left and she was alone, Talia pushed herself to sitting. It was thoda – bad luck – for the zaffre to see her dead, but the Painter would tell Burrin and the others that she was alive and they would come soon. She needed to be ready.

  As always, she had no idea what she would tell Burrin when he asked her what she’d seen. Telling lies, she believed, came best without rehearsal. But every time, she worried that she would trip herself up, get it wrong, and Burrin – smart, suspicious Burrin – would find her out.

  The large room – she had come to think of it as the lying room, although its true name was Mekalan Hall – was a rectangle of white synth walls, empty but for a bed, two chairs, and a table upon which rested a folded drape of fabric the same blue as her cloak. Her winding sheet.

  The far wall was the only anomaly, a single piece of translucent metal, three times as tall as Talia. Three times again as wide as it was tall. The mekalan.

  Written across the very top in a fine hand: THE MOON DID MELD US AND WE DID SHINE.

  Beneath, the painted ones. The dead ones. The would-be poison eaters, men and women, who had come before her and died before her. So many that they piled up like strata, filling the wall space until they were cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder, their painted blue cloaks flowing together so they became one great blue sky dotted with dark stars of faces. The sun flowed through the paint, stopping only at the thickness of the eyes, which were detailed with so many layers they almost seemed to suck the very light into them.

  The Painter had mixed their fat and marrow and blood into his colors and given each of them eternity on this wall.

  Eternity. The vordcha had talked about eternity, too. To them, eternity looked like carving memory into the body: their memories into her body. Here, eternity looked like painting the body into memory: her body into their memories.

  Talia was pretty sure she didn’t care for eternity, either way. She would take her own now over someone else’s imparted forever.

  The sun shifted, shining cantways through the clear wall, sending colored shadows across the floor and over her feet. Through the thinnest layers of paint, Talia could see the diviners on the other side of the wall, in the street. On their knees, they prostrated before the art, running their palms over the images in complex patterns that meant something unknown to her. They sing-songed, low and melodious, in time to their movements, only the lowest notes coming through the plating.

  They were praying for her. Until she left Mekalan Hall and walked among them again, they would believe she was caught in Attor, the space between life and death. Unlike the Painter (and probably a few others), the diviners very much wanted her to continue to live.

  Talia touched one of the paintings on the wall, running her fingers over the textures of the woman’s face. The wall was hot where the colors were light – the white of her hair, her pale teeth – and nearly freezing in the shadows: the dark folds of her cloak, the black orbs of her eyes.

  The woman’s name was Uprys, a would-be poison eater who had died shortly after Talia had arrived. Talia had gone to watch the poisoning, not because she was interested in it or even understood it, but because it was something that people did here, and she’d been trying to blend in. If she was honest with herself, she’d mostly gone because when the blue-haired woman on the Green Road had asked if she was going, her mismatched eyes had lingered in a way that Talia had not been ready to protect against.

  Talia had been surprised to see that same woman standing in the middle of the clave – a word she’d just come to know – dressed in blue and bronze, draped in light. But she’d been even more surprised to watch another woman enter from what Talia now knew was the door to the tunnel outside her own room, and to hear the crowd begin to chant.

  Uprys, a tall, almost gaunt woman, had worn the same cloak that Talia wore now. She was older than Talia, the white shine of her hair piled in little circles around her head. When she reached into the device, she’d pulled out what looked like a shelled creature of some kind. It was hard to see from as far away as Talia was – way up near the top of the curving walls – but when it wiggled in the woman’s hand, even Talia could tell that it was alive.

  It wasn’t until the woman lifted the creature between her thin fingers and brought it to her open mouth that Talia had understood that she was expected to swallow the thing. She’d been unable to suppress the shudder that rose in her, and couldn’t understand how it was that no one else around her seemed to feel the same.

  Somehow, impossibly, the woman had lowered the creature into her mouth. Talia could have sworn she saw it catch and bob in the woman’s long throat, but she had since convinced herself that wasn’t possible. She’d been too far away to have seen such a thing, surely.

  The woman had swallowed, coughed, and then just… disappeared. Not completely. It was still possible to see her outline, a long draw of lines where she’d been just moments ago. The lines shuddered, contracted, and then broke apart, seeming to whirl into a thing that was utterly inhuman, each line a leg and a mouth at the same time, the outline of a hundred heads. The vision lasted only a second and then the woman was there again, falling to the floor in a spasm of gnashing teeth and clenched fists.

  Uprys’ legacy was that she’d had four successful poisonings – the last one warning the city of a roving band of abhumans – before the fifth took her.
Talia imagined the Painter had been very pleased indeed. Uprys was beautiful on the wall, her face depicting an expression of sweetness and longing.

  Beside her was a man named Darad. Talia had met him a few times before the poisoning, and he seemed steady, confident even, that he would become the next orness without issue. Talia hadn’t been able to convince herself to attend another poisoning – not even for the woman with the mismatched eyes – but she had heard about it both times Darad succeeded, once even delivering the rare good news that nothing dangerous lurked on the horizon. The next thing she’d heard, Darad was gone and his image had gone up on the mekalan.

  And the orness was beginning her search for a new poison eater.

  And Talia was starting to come up with her plan for filling that hole.

  She touched an unpainted space on the wall. A hole too. One reserved for her face.

  “Not this time,” she said aloud, just as the door opened behind her.

  Even without turning, she could tell Burrin had entered the room first. She’d noticed he always did, when he could. Plus, his footsteps were… unique. He wore boots soled with some type of metal that made every step an announcement of his presence. It was still a surprise to her, how someone whose job it was to protect and hunt might never consider the virtues of not being noticed right away. But certainly she was happy to use it to her advantage when she could.

  “They’re beautiful, yes?” Burrin said.

  If he was ever disappointed to walk through that door and see her alive, he never showed it.

  “Affah,” she agreed.

  She heard him step closer – one footfall, the next – and then his voice was low in her ear, designed only for her to hear. “And they are fools,” he said. “Down in the dirt for the not-yet-dead.” A thing no one else in Enthait would dare say, most surely not to her.

  She said nothing. For a moment, side by side, they watched the diviners on their knees, praying into the unknown for a thing they didn’t know had already happened.