Numenera--The Poison Eater Read online

  Talia opened her mouth to ask one of the many questions swirling around in her breath but didn’t know who to ask it to. Beneath the table, Isera’s leg pushed to hers, a quick touch that could have meant anything. She thought it was a warning, and so she closed her mouth without making a sound.

  Woris drained his cup, slammed it hard against the table. “Someone get the poison eater a drink!” he said. “If we drink, so shall she!”

  Ardit made a circular gesture with his hand above the crowd. She had no idea where it came from, but a moment later, she had a half-filled, slopped-over mug in her true hand. When she brought it to her nose, the liquid smelled of something oily and rancid. Her stomach rolled, thinking of the poison she’d swallowed earlier, leaving her unable to do more than touch her lips to the rim.

  As soon as she did so, a roar went up from the other side of the tavern, and then wild applause. The goldglam had begun a new dance, no doubt a zenith to end the evening. Talia couldn’t see from where she was sitting, but whatever it was, it caught the eyes of those standing. She felt their attention slide away from her, prey released from the steely gaze of the hunter.

  Talia reached and touched Isera’s hand beneath the table. Risky, but worth it when she felt Isera’s fingers tighten over her own in a quick pulse before she let go.

  “What is happening?” she asked Isera, beneath the din.

  Isera leaned in, almost imperceptibly, but in a way that brought her voice closer to Talia’s ear.

  “They’re sending all of us out.”

  “All of the greyes?”

  Isera lifted a brow, nodded. Usually it was Burrin, Ardit, and one or two other greyes. After her second poisoning, she’d described a cragworm, a giant burrowing beast she’d read about, and half a dozen of them had gone out. But that was the most she’d ever heard of. Never all of them.

  “Even you?” she asked. Isera could fight – all the zaffre could – but it wasn’t her specialty. Hers was more… people-focused. She rarely went into the Tawn.

  “All of us.”

  Isera answered her next question before Talia asked it.

  “It’s the charn,” Isera said quietly, as if that were an answer that made sense, when it truly made none.

  That word. She’d heard Ardit say it, but it had slid by her. She repeated it, made it a question.

  Talia watched Isera fiddle with her knife, sliding it between her fingers before she answered.

  “The creatures you saw,” Isera said.

  For the first time, Talia noticed Isera’s hands were trembling. Oh. It wasn’t boredom that had her playing with her knife; it was fear. Talia hadn’t recognized it because she’d never seen Isera afraid before.

  A shiv of her own fear slipped into her, cold and hollow.

  Wait. You made them up. These things that are so dangerous. They’re nothing. Sometimes she told her lies so well that even she forgot.

  “How…” She was trying to figure out what she wanted to ask, how to do so without giving herself away. “How do they know what it is?”

  By way of an answer, Isera drew a triangle shape on the table with her finger. The shape of wings. Wings Talia had made up, out of stories and memories. On a whim. Oh, Talia.

  “We leave at dawn,” Isera said. She let the knife fall to the table, lifted her mismatched gaze in a quick catch of Talia’s eyes. “You could come before.”

  It was an invitation that Talia wanted very badly to accept.

  Talia opened her mouth, tempted to tell the truth, to put it out there, everything she knew, everything she was not. She would tell Isera, and Isera would… what? Tell Burrin? And everyone would know she was a liar, that she was not the poison eater after all.

  What punishment, that? She didn’t know. Surely there had never been another like her. Liar. False seer. It was unthinkable to betray the city so. They would have to devise a whole new punishment just for her.

  Whatever punishment they came up with, it would be nothing compared to this: she would not become the orness. She would not gain access to the aria, she would not be able to kill the vordcha once and for all. And elsewhere, a dozen new children would replace her and her sisters in the oily murk of the blackweave. A dozen new children would be opened and filled with mech and memories.

  For as long as the vordcha lived, they needed martyrs. As long as there were martyrs, she needed to become the orness.

  She couldn’t tell the truth. She couldn’t risk it.

  So much finwa, so much sorry for what she was about to do.

  So she held her tongue, unwilling or unable to put the truth out there. Beneath the table, Isera’s leg touched hers and Talia realized that her whole body was shaking, trembling, a leaf on the verge of falling.

  And still Talia said nothing. Ardit gave a signal, telling all the zaffre it was time to go, to sleep it off and be ready to rise before the dawn and ride. Not even when Burrin stepped forward from the corner – Talia’s breath stopped, fell from her mouth like a living thing, he was here, why? – not even when he stopped and caught her gaze, hard eyes holding her own for two beats too long. Not even when Isera stood from the table and looked at her, a gaze that said how very much she knew, and how very little, and radiated all her fear and dread.

  All things that Talia could have saved her from. And still, and still, Talia sat there, her face hooded in her reversible cloak, and she said nothing and did nothing. And it wasn’t long before the tavern was empty but for a false poison eater and a golden-winged dancer and a man painted in arrows pointing nowhere.

  CLEAVE

  After leaving the Scarlet Sisk, Talia found herself in front of Isera’s house, her fist raised to knock on the black synth door. She’d waited until everyone was gone from the bar and the streets were empty before threading her way through the city northward.

  Isera’s door was inscribed with a shining silver spiral, designed to be seen from anywhere on the street. Everyone knew what the symbol meant.

  For criminals or would-be criminals, it said, The person who lives here is a greyes. Take your business elsewhere.

  For law-abiding citizens, it said, A greyes lives here. Knock if you are in need.

  Caught somewhere between those two things, Talia lifted her knuckles and knocked.

  Isera answered so quickly it was as though she were waiting on the other side of the door. Talia thought – hoped – that were true. She was still wearing the purple dress from the Sisk. The way it wrapped her shoulders drew attention to the long hollow of her neck, the strength of her chin.

  “Finwa, Poison Eater,” she said. The formal, and required, greeting was one that Talia heard many times a day. And yet, when Isera let it roll from her tongue, accompanied by her wry smile, it was utterly different. Somehow more personal and private than even her own name. It almost washed away the forced formality of their greeting in the Sisk.

  “Moon meld you, Greyes Isera.” They went through the rituals – thumbs over eyes, words passed between them – but here there was an impatient undercurrent beneath the exchange. The gestures felt like a necessary, but overly long, step to ease the transition from what they had been to the world to what they would be to each other. There was always this moment between the two of them, when they shook off their roles, their formalities, and found their way back to themselves. In a way, Talia supposed that was its own kind of ritual.

  “Come in already,” Isera said, her laughter hushed, pulling the door wider, gesturing Talia inside.

  The front room was lit by large metal moths mounted on the walls. Each time they flapped their wings, the room filled with dancing yellow light. They were so beautiful that Talia had thought they were real, living creatures the first time she’d seen them. It still took all her will not to hold out her hand, hoping for such beauty to land upon it, if only for a moment.

  That was before she could hold out her hand, as she did now, toward a completely different beauty. Isera took her hand, curling their fingers together. She was stil
l trembling. Her row of rings scratched tiny cuts across Talia’s palm.

  “Where’s Seild?” Talia asked.

  Isera gestured toward the back of the house, behind the dark green curtains that hung across the hall. Asleep, then. Probably for hours.

  “The poisonings have a cost for everyone,” Isera said. In the flicker, her grey eye reflected shimmering streaks of light. “For Seild, it’s only sleep. What’s their cost for you, Poison Eater?”

  There was a word Maeryl had taught her long ago. Onas. It meant one who hides nothing and sees all. It wasn’t an Enthait word, or even one in the Truth. But it was the perfect word for Isera.

  Rather than answer, Talia asked a question of her own. It wasn’t what she wanted to ask, not yet, but it was a step toward it. “You’re scared about tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Isera lifted one shoulder, the beginning of an attempt at nonchalance, but it fell away. “But I’m good at what I do. As are the others.”

  How to tell her not to be afraid? How to explain that the beasts were nothing more than figments of Talia’s mind? She didn’t know.

  “It’s just a few creatures,” Talia said. “Perhaps it will turn out to be nothing. Or… I could be wrong about what I saw. I’m never quite sure what the poisoning is telling me.” It was the closest she’d come to telling Isera the truth. The words had weight, but she couldn’t tell if they were growing heavier or lighter as she said them.

  “The charn are not just a few creatures. Don’t you read those books that you’re always borrowing from Omuf-Rhi?” Isera’s voice tried for soft teasing, but it fell flat, gave way to the same fear it had carried earlier.

  Talia had read the books she borrowed from Books & Blades, Omuf-Rhi’s shop. She’d offered to help him out around the shop in exchange for reading privileges, and she took full advantage of it, reading as many as she could, as often as she could. She’d scoured them for clues about the poison eater, the orness, the aria, but she couldn’t remember seeing the word charn in there.

  “You’ve fought them before?” Talia asked.

  “Moon meld me, no,” Isera said. “I only know the stories.”

  Talia had more questions, but Isera stayed them with her words. “The truth is that, yes, I’m scared. But talking about it won’t make me less so.” She gave Talia a dimpled smile that was, at its first moment, forced, and then opened up into the real thing. “There are other things I’d much rather talk about. Well, not talk so much as…”

  Isera stepped closer. The soft swish of the fabric against her skin was, for a moment, the only sound in the room. As she shifted in the fluttering light, it was hard to tell that her eyes were not the same color. They both looked the grey of the moonlight in shadow.

  Sometimes just looking at her was enough to knock the breath from Talia’s lungs. She didn’t know how she felt about that. It was dangerous – but there was something about this danger that drew her in. That made her want more and more.

  Talia took a long stride, closing the space between them. Isera often smelled of clean sweat and steel-oil, but that was only a top layer, superficial. Easily washed off. Not that Talia minded – she liked the scent on her. But it was her public scent, one that everyone got. Tonight, she smelled only of herself, a soft mixture of cyrria spices and green boughs that always seemed to beckon Talia closer.

  Isera lowered her head. Talia did the same until she was touching her forehead to Isera’s. They stood that way a long time, breathing.

  “I see what you’re doing,” Isera said.

  “No, you don’t,” Talia said, hoping, praying to the moon or the mech or the datasphere or whatever one might pray to that actually worked, that it was not true. The moment Isera saw through her, all of this would end. It was as good a reason as any to stop, to step away and walk out right now, to never be so close to this woman again.

  Step away.

  But her feet would not go. And when Isera moved forward and lifted her mouth to Talia’s, the only thing her body would let her do was respond in kind. Isera’s hands pushed up Talia’s spine to the back of her head, pulling her in.

  Isera was not Talia’s first. She’d slept with some of her sisters in the blackweave – it was one of the few small comforts the vordcha had not taken from them. She found pleasure there, and escape certainly, but being with Isera was different. Not even with Maeryl had she felt both this powerful and this afraid.

  She was never sure if she worried that Isera would split her open or put her back together. Or perhaps both, one after the other.

  That hesitation stayed her hand for a heartbeat, but after another kiss, after the rough tumble to the stone floor that had them laughing as the floor poked into Talia’s hip and then grasping for clothes, corners and clasps and anything else they could get their hands on; after that, it didn’t matter. Afraid or not, they were here, Talia was here, and there was nowhere else she would choose to be instead.

  They didn’t undress. Merely opened the places of their clothing that could be opened and met their bodies together there, heat and desire tangling together. They were fast and as furtive as their passion allowed, aware that any moment, someone might knock on Isera’s door, seeking the help of a greyes who was currently half-clothed and digging her nails into the bare back of the city’s poison eater.

  Isera was a lithe and restless lover, all moving muscles beneath Talia’s hands and mouth. It was easy to tell the things that pleased her. She talked constantly, a steady soft stream of praise and pleasure. Talia was more pleased when she brought Isera pleasure than when she found her own, partly because her own came so easy here – a thing she had not yet figured out how to reconcile – and partly because Isera was such a pleasure to watch, the arch of her body, the half-closed eyes, the way her neck lengthened so you could see the thrumming beat of her pulse.

  When Isera peaked, she was loud enough that she clamped her own hand over her mouth, laughing a moment later as she came down.

  They both stilled momentarily to listen for the patter of sleepy feet coming down the hall. There was no sound other than their own hastened breath.

  “You’re beautiful,” Talia said after, because she didn’t know what else to say to quell the pace of her heart against her skin, to soften the pounding of her blood.

  Isera lay on her elbow in front of her, one hand trailing over Talia’s shoulders and down her back. Her fingers found the intricate ridges over Talia’s skin, traced one of them down toward the wide swath at her spine. Shame and fear tried to flare up, but somehow Isera’s touch kept them at bay.

  “Someday, you’ll tell me this story.”

  “Someday,” Talia said. Unlike with the Painter, she didn’t know that this was untrue. Would she tell Isera of the vordcha, of the martyrs, of the complex pattern scarred upon the spines of them all? Her answer – maybe – gave her some kind of hidden feeling that she didn’t dare look at too closely.

  “What does it look like?” Talia asked. She’d seen her sisters’ spine scars, all of them different, none of them given meaning that made sense, but she’d never seen her own, could only trace the edges of it with one hand.

  “A tree,” Isera said. “It looks like a tree.”

  Isera ran her fingers along the outline of it, slow and steady enough that it began to take shape. The thick base at her lower back. The long trunk that rose up her spine. The delicate branches that threaded toward her shoulders. Such a thing couldn’t be beautiful, and yet, beneath the stroke of Isera’s fingers, it was. Almost.

  “I should prepare for tomorrow,” Isera said finally. The reluctance in her voice made Talia smile.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Talia said.

  “And I wish you wouldn’t eat poison every time the moon changes.” Isera’s voice was teasing, but there was a sharp truth hidden inside the words, like a stinging bee wrapped inside a flower. Isera shifted, and began to pull sections of her outfit closed around her, buttoning buttons, closing clasps. The soft slow movements were
gone, replaced with the efficient strength of a fighter. “But I understand why you do it.”

  She didn’t, of course. She thought Talia did it for the good of the city, for the good of Seild and Ganeth and the others. For the same reason that Isera was zaffre and let her daughter be zaffre.

  They finished dressing in silence, their furtive movements interrupted only by the sudden sound of Khee snoring from the back room. Talia couldn’t help but laugh, and Isera soon followed. “I didn’t even know he was here,” Talia said.

  “He comes in the evenings sometimes. I think he helps Seild go to sleep. But usually he leaves before dawn.”

  Talia had wondered where he’d been going lately. She’d have guessed hunting for sport along Enthait’s outer walls, where little green lizards sometimes ran to and fro between the stones. This seemed better somehow, more complete.

  Isera leaned in, laughing quietly. “Sometimes she reads to him. But really it’s more like her telling him a nonsensical story and him sleeping through it. She doesn’t seem to mind.”

  They listened to Khee snarl in his sleep from the other room for a moment.

  “I wish I had faith that would be me shortly, sound asleep and dreaming,” Isera said.

  “I could stay,” Talia said, and then regretted it because she knew the answer. Oh, the heart gone to rot and softness. So soon.

  Isera shook her head, her only response. The jewels in her hair had come loose and one tumbled down to her shoulder. She plucked it and put it back with the smooth efficiency that defined most of her movements. Fucking. Fighting. Even fidgeting.

  The way of her made Talia want to guide her all the way back down to the floor, breath to breath. She clasped her hex hand to her true hand to keep herself still.

  “Who will watch her?” Talia said. They both knew who she meant.

  “Ganeth offered.”

  “Of course.” She was oddly both saddened and relieved to hear Ganeth’s name. She would have watched Seild, of course, although in all honesty she had no idea what it meant to watch a girl that age and likely would have botched it badly. Not to mention that Seild’s face would remind her every moment of her mother, the woman that Talia’s lies were about to send into harm’s way.