Numenera--The Poison Eater Read online

  “Well, what dangers have you brought us this time?” Burrin asked. As if it was not the dangers she saw, but her very presence that brought destruction upon the city.

  She turned. Unlike his mother, Burrin kept no part of his face hidden. In fact, he accentuated the sharp angles of his cheeks and jaw with a soft crimson wrap that coiled about his neck and ran under his zaffre bronzes and blues. His dark eyes – so black they sometimes seemed to run toward purple – were set deep in his head. Everything about him was sharp and striking, like a well-wielded blade.

  Two of the other greyes stood behind him.

  Talia had taught herself the names of all ten greyes as soon as she’d decided to become the poison eater. Names were important. They had power. Not a power that you could hold in your hand, but something intangible. Powerful the way that air was powerful. She knew many of the zaffre’s names too, although nowhere near all. She’d thought at first there might be dozens of them, but over time, she’d started to notice that there were far more than she’d imagined.

  These greyes were Imran and Rynz. Imran bore a shaved head, and an ever-present scowl beneath a thick black mustache. Rynz had two dimples on the right side when he smiled, and a gap between his teeth that whistled softly when he exhaled.

  She liked both of them – she would have said she liked them better than she liked Burrin, but that could be said about any of the greyes, and probably most of the zaffre as well, even the ones she didn’t know. She liked them quite a bit more than that – but that wasn’t why she was glad to see them standing behind Burrin. She was glad because neither of them was Isera.

  For someone who was brutally bad at telling lies, Isera could spot one on your lips before you even spoke it. Those mismatched eyes had purpose. Lying to Burrin in front of her would have put Isera in a place where she’d be torn between her duty to the zaffre and her… whatever it was she felt for Talia.

  It seemed that so far, luck of the draw had kept Isera out of the lying room. But if Talia kept surviving, Isera would be in here with Burrin eventually. She just hoped it wouldn’t be soon.

  By way of greeting, Imran and Rynz put their thumbs to the spaces above their eyes. Talia responded in kind, although she kept her attention entirely on Burrin. He was all that mattered here.

  “Moon meld you, Greyes Burrin,” she said.

  “And you,” he replied. He never used her title. Nor her name. Burrin never went by the formalities when he could get away with not.

  Talia let her thumbs linger above her eyes a heartbeat beyond what was expected. She never brushed aside the rituals with Burrin; if anything, she went the other way, overly formal, overly perfect. He didn’t scare her, as he seemed to others. But he was smart and he was driven – and she was sure she was standing in his way.

  At first, she’d thought Burrin dumb and peevish, the spoiled son of the orness who’d gotten his job by nothing more than the luck of his bloodline. But it hadn’t taken her long to see that wasn’t true. He wasn’t like Seild, an impatient child who had to be reminded of her duties in order to return to them. When he skipped the rituals, he did so to make it clear he was above them, that they were unnecessary. As were you. He was as sharp as those sticks he carried. She had to be sharper.

  “Greyes Burrin, I hope you weren’t kept waiting too long by my lack of death,” she said.

  A cool game they played. Her pretending deference, loyalty, truth. Him pretending to believe that she felt any of those things. She knew why she played it; she had yet to figure out why he did. She could only imagine he was biding his time. Waiting for her to slip up. Or die.

  The words, scathing and burnt – your mother didn’t choose you, she chose me – rose to her tongue, but she held them there, silent seeds for the future.

  “We shall see, once we hear your story,” he said.

  The first time she’d stood before Burrin, she had been scared. Terrified. She’d taken the poison, expecting either to die or to see a true threat to the city. Neither of those things had happened.

  Instead, she’d seen the moment she and Maeryl had begun to plan their escape from the vordcha. In the poison dream, they’d been in bed together – if you could call the oily substrate they’d piled up a bed – as Maeryl drew fingers along Talia’s arm. Beneath the skin, the vordcha’s metal and mech made a living tattoo of branches that marked her blood and bone.

  Maeryl’s mech was elsewhere, hidden in the depths of her head. When the vordcha implanted a new memory in her, she would slide away for days on end, forgetting everything else. Forgetting Talia. Forgetting herself. But in that moment, she was fully present, fully Maeryl.

  “We won’t win,” Maeryl had said.

  “We can’t lose anything else,” Talia had responded.

  That was the moment they’d begun to plan.

  That first poison dream, Talia hadn’t known what it meant. Why had she seen her own past in the poisoning instead of the city’s future, as they had told her she would? Afraid, uncertain, she’d planned to tell Burrin the truth. That she wasn’t the poison eater, that she didn’t see any dangers to the city. She’d opened her mouth to say, “I didn’t see anything. I just had a memory. Or maybe a dream.”

  Instead, she started telling a story about a long-legged hunter stalking its way toward the city. Hungry and seeking. Moving in from the west.

  Why? Instinct. Self-preservation. A way out. Yes. But also, there was something she saw in Burrin even then. An edge. She thought it was an expectation that all things belonged to him, or should belong to him. And that if he just waited her out, he would have this thing too. In that, he had reminded her of the vordcha, and she could not bring herself to tell the truth. Could not bring herself to give up so easily.

  All of those things had crashed into her and she had spit out their seeds and started this untrue thing growing inside her.

  Burrin’s foot tapped impatiently, a metallic click. “The Painter said you were not dying,” he said. “So…?”

  Talia waited a moment, a breath, let Burrin’s question settle into the space before she lifted her gaze to his eyes. Those dark pools were impossible to read. She imagined that were she younger, she would have looked there and found herself drowning in that blackness. But she’d known the kind of blackness that stole the breath, that stole the very beating of one’s heart, and this was so far short of that the space between gave her a kind of strength.

  She lowered her voice slightly and began to tell her story. She never knew what she was going to say until she began, but she could always taste the story on her tongue as it arrived, the taste of cool, clear water running through her.

  “Ebeli showed me true,” she said. “The coming of a flock of winged beasts, from the southwest.” She closed her eyes and began to bring the creatures to life upon her tongue.

  She’d sometimes told stories for her sisters in the blackweave. Stories they would first tell to her, disjointed, personal, full of back and forths and confusion, and she would take the threads and spin them into something grand. Something that made them forget, for a moment, the metal bits beneath their skin, the horror beneath their dreams.

  She pulled the details of the poisonings from those stories and her own mind, details gleaned and honed, weaving them together as she went, more by instinct than anything else. She pulled in details from books she’d read here, from the tapestries in the market, from the children’s tales on the street. Had the other poison eaters told such stories? She didn’t know.

  Burrin gave her no indication either way. He stood listening but unmoved. No response to anything she said, other than a small tightening of his eyes as she described the creatures’ wings, metallic triangles that reflected the orange desert below and the blue sky above.

  At that pull of his eyes, she worried she’d gone too far; what if the poisoning wasn’t as detailed for the others? What if all they had were vague impressions? It was too late to take the detail back, and so she pushed on. She thought of Khee and a
dded yawning mouths, filled with multiple rows of teeth. She thought of a tapestry she’d seen in the market and talked of talon-tipped claws on long legs. She thought of the poison dream, and when she told him of the rows of stingers along the beasts’ stomachs, the numbing poisons, her shudders were not a lie.

  Imran and Rynz exchanged a glance. Imran mouthed something to Rynz that Talia couldn’t make out, and Rynz nodded. Whatever Burrin might think, they, at least, believed her tale.

  When she was done, Burrin nodded, and made a gesture toward the two greyes behind him. Something else Talia couldn’t read, but they both bowed their heads and stepped quickly from the room.

  Burrin watched them go, then pulled a tiny orb from his pocket. It was dark blue, etched with silver lines. When he shook it in his fist, a piece of thick fabric bloomed from its center. He spread the fabric on the bottom of the bed, running his hands over it to smooth it. Beneath his fingers, it became a map.

  She refused to admit, even to herself, how much she coveted this device of his. Not the device so much, but what it promised – the whole world in your hand, available to you with little more than a flick of your wrist. Her desire was a secret she kept buried in the layers of her skin, lest he discover it and use it against her. She didn’t even know why she craved it, exactly.

  Talia looked at the map on the bed, letting the places on it sink into her mind once again. The city of Enthait from above, looking as she’d never seen it in life, spread out across the middle of the fabric. The clave, the Endless Market, the Green Road, the skars – tall, scythe-shaped buildings that dotted the city – even Isera’s house, although Talia didn’t look directly at it. Not with Burrin watching her so closely.

  Around Enthait, the rusty orange desert – the Tawn – that flowed out for miles before it eventually became grassland and then forest and then the unknown where the fabric folded back on itself. The blackweave was out there, somewhere, in that blank space, and it pleased her to know that on this map at least, it did not appear. It almost made it possible for her to believe, just for a moment, that it did not exist at all.

  “Now, tell me exactly where you saw these creatures,” Burrin said.

  Talia didn’t hesitate. She picked a point on the map, off to the southwest, a tiny pinpoint of dust or ink that specked the fabric. That place was as good as any for her lie.

  “There,” she said. “I saw them there.”

  * * *

  As soon as Burrin left and she could breathe again, she realized she was ravenous, dizzy with hunger. Every part of her body had become a sudden, gaping void that demanded to be filled. A creature of mouth and fist, a beast of hunger and need, she was suddenly, irrevocably sure that she would die if she didn’t become fulfilled. She didn’t let herself think of how that hunger, that need, was not just for food, but also for something else.

  Isera.

  Hurrying at the very thought of her, Talia removed her cloak, then felt around for the tiny pocket in its hem. Inside, a small round knob was attached to the coat by a piece of thin wire. She tugged the knob – “Softly, please!” she could almost hear Ganeth say, as he had the first time, when she’d nearly torn it loose from its moorings. She didn’t pretend to understand most of the devices he made, and he often had to guide her in their use, lest she destroy something with her carelessness. He treated his creations the way most people might treat their children, and it clearly pained him to watch her interacting with them. She was about as good with devices as she was with children, so that was something he should be grateful for at least.

  Her first tug was too gentle, and nothing happened. She pulled a little harder and was rewarded as the cloak tightened in upon itself, vibrating so hard she could feel it in the bottom of her stomach. And then it turned itself… inside out. Except it didn’t. It wasn’t like when you turned a shirt inside out. This was as though each part of the fabric, the very weave and stitch of it, reversed themselves. In a moment, she was holding a long grey wrap that looked and felt nothing like the cloak she’d just been wearing.

  “Most people will know your trappings,” Ganeth had said. “Not your face. At least, not while you’re alive.”

  He’d meant to be helpful, saying that. But she hadn’t been able to quell the flinch that pulled her spine tight, and as soon as the words were out, he bared his teeth in apology. He wasn’t, she had come to understand, very good at those types of things.

  Now she pulled the wrap over her shoulders, tugging the heavy hood up so that her hair was hidden and her face was deep in the fabric’s shadow. Then she shifted the fabric around her, draping it until it covered her hexed hand. She would have taken the band off, but she had no pockets. And as much as she might have protested when Ganeth had given her the thing, she did find it useful. Plus, she suspected that having no hand might be just as much of a giveaway as having a mechanical one.

  When she stepped outside, darkness hadn’t arrived yet, but it was on its way. The light from the sun-powered glowglobes shone softly all along the street. Here and there, mirrored orbs, smaller than her fist, bobbed around the shine. She’d never figured out what they were – device? creature? debris? – and no one else seemed to take notice of them, but she’d seen them fluttering, often near lights, at all times of day.

  Even though the mekalan opened onto the Green Road – one of the busiest areas of the city – it was mostly quiet. It often was after the poisonings. Few walked the streets. She imagined people went home to mourn their losses, or to one of the bars in the rundown section of the Break to crow about their winnings. And, she thought, something about the poisoning, about the poison eater, about her, scared them as much as it drew them.

  She didn’t know how news traveled so quickly in the city, but it did, and by the time she stepped onto the street, she bet nearly everyone who cared to know did know – whether she’d survived, what she saw in the poisoning, and how the zaffre were planning to respond. Sometimes, it seemed that she, out of everyone inside Enthait’s walls, was the last to know. Perhaps second only to the diviners.

  Who even now were still touching the wall, singing their prayers. Talia began to make her way past them. None noticed her passing. After she walked by them, she stopped and turned back. She tugged her hood down around her neck, waiting for one to recognize her – whether they truly were fools or not, as Burrin believed, she couldn’t bear to think of them down on their knees for any longer, praying for something they didn’t know had already come to pass.

  Just as she was starting to regret her decision – she was hungry and tired, and attention was the last thing she desired – one of them noticed her. A tiny older man with white paste across his dark brow and yellowing hair placed his fists over his eyes in what Talia understood to be the old gesture of reverence, long replaced by the pressing of thumbs above the eyes. His language was gnarled and twisted, words that slipped through Talia’s understanding like water through her fingers. It wasn’t the Truth, but it carried the lilt of it, just enough that she felt like she should know it, even though she didn’t. The other diviners heard it and joined in, putting their fists over their eyes and then, seemingly as one, pressing their foreheads to the ground.

  She never quite got used to this moment. Standing, while others knelt before her, their fists against their eyes. Blind. Below. Vulnerable. The first time it had happened, she’d tried to get them all to rise, to go back to their homes and their lives. But they had shrunk from her touch, refusing to stand or stop singing as long as she remained standing there. Now, she muttered a soft thank you, for what she wasn’t sure, and shrank back into the shadows of her wrap.

  She stepped briskly toward the soft pink lights of the Scarlet Sisk.

  Since Talia’s very first poisoning – tursin, a yellow goo in the shape of a moth that had burst open as soon as she’d put it in her mouth, sending a dry, coughing powder down her throat – since that first time, she and Isera had met after at the Scarlet Sisk, a little nothing bar not far from Mekalan
Hall.

  The place was dark, private, and rarely busy. There was just enough of a hum in the air to make her feel as though they could talk without being heard, and it gave them reason to sit close, mouths to each other’s ears.

  It was risky to meet in public, but the effects of the poisoning stayed with her, in her head if not in her bones. She needed time to shake that off, but she also didn’t want to be alone. The lasting effect of spending her whole life in a small space with others, she guessed. Always vying for room, but being so used to the press of bodies that you forgot how to make the edges of your own skin. Spending time with Isera at the Sisk gave her time to fill herself up again, become whole, find where her skin began.

  That first time she and Isera had met at the Sisk, it was accidental. Talia had stepped out of Mekalan Hall into the street, starving, confused, having just lied to the leader of the zaffre. No one had taught her what to expect or do after that first poisoning. Because no one, she realized now, had expected her to survive it.

  Just outside the door she’d been waylaid by the diviners, who’d wanted to surround her that first time, to keep her there, as if to ensure that she truly was alive. Someone else had run up the street, shaking his fists at her, yelling about the shins she’d cost him by daring to stay alive.

  Shaken, she’d ducked around the nearest dark corner, walking until she’d found an old stone building with light flickering inside. It wasn’t until she’d peered through the windows that she’d even realized it was a bar. A secret business with no sign out front was definitely her kind of place. And when she’d seen a flash of blue curls in a corner booth, she’d pushed open the door and gone inside.

  The second time, she’d asked Isera if she would meet her there after, and Isera had not hesitated to say yes. The Sisk had become their dark and quiet haven, a place where they could both feel unwatched, unnoticed, safe. A place where no one would care when their fingers brushed together across the table.