Chapter 32 #2
There was a shimmer in the room beside me. Just like the last time, someone was now sitting on my bed, half-veiled in shadow, watching me with earnest eyes.
My nose filled with the aroma of gowns and dresses, and comforting warmth, and rain on cool afternoons. I turned my head.
I looked at her and knew her. I knew her face, which was so much like my own.
I knew the way she tied her thick, black hair into a braid and cast it over her shoulder so it draped just so.
I remembered the patterns of her robes, and the smell of her perfumes, and the scent of her breath in the early mornings, when I would awake in her arms with her slumbering beside me, and I would lie there and study the sun on the fretvine ceiling above us, and listen to the birdsong in the trees beyond.
“Ohh,” I said very softly.
Yes, she said. She smiled, and the sight of it broke my heart asunder.
I swallowed. “Why? Why you?”
You know why, she said. But you also know this is wrong, yes? You should not be here, not now, of all times.
I turned to the open window, glimmering with silvery moonlight.
“I am in a memory,” I said.
Yes.
“I am delivered back to the moment when he conditioned me—outside in the street below, the night Castus perished.”
Yes.
“And…now I hear it again. Because he’s in the tavern with me now, isn’t he? He’s frozen me, and he’s making his play.”
Yes. So. What shall you do about it?
The powerful euphoria within me crinkled. Swirled. Then it dissolved, like a dollop of sugar in hot tea.
I then felt what was possibly the most bizarre experience I’d ever had in all my life: my mind very calmly informed me I was in two places at once.
It was like I was seeing a different world out of each eye: I was in the Drover, standing perfectly still in my chambers, just as the music insisted, with the woman on the bed watching me with her deeply sad eyes; in the other, I was at the top of the stairs, gripping the railing, my mouth open as I prepared to shout down to the custodi to come in, come in.
It was as if each vision, each experience, was perfectly overlaid atop the next, like parchments glued atop one another.
It is a memory, I thought to myself. And I cannot be forced into a memory any more than a fish can be drowned.
I pushed away the vision of my chambers. Dimmed it, dismissed it, banished it.
I remember you, I told it forcefully. And you are not now. Not real. Not current.
But though I could see both, I could not resist the commands of the beautiful song assailing my thoughts, drowning my mind, suffocating my will. I was still frozen, still forced into paralysis by the infestation in my skull.
Move, I thought to myself. Please move. Please, please…
Yet I could not. It was as if the nerves in my legs and spine and arms had forgotten the very concept. I was trapped in the prison of my body, unable to do anything more than watch the world before me.
A shadow moved at the foot of the stairs. Then, cautiously, silently, he ascended to me.
—
He had a pale blue cloak about his shoulders, as well as the helmet he’d worn when I’d first glimpsed him, standing weary but proud before the doors of the Lacanthim jail.
With his blue cloak and cap, I realized he looked a good deal like a custodus in the dark, which surely had made it easier for him to slip inside.
As he climbed the stairs with hardly a sound, I saw he did not bear his lance tonight, but a short sword, and a tool that I recognized right away: a cat pipe, just like the one I’d seen outside mere seconds ago.
I watched, screaming in frustration and rage in my own mind as the huge, hulking form of Trikao Armenta mounted the stairs and carefully stepped around me.
He looked not at all like the beleaguered, kindly old man I’d known in the past days.
Now there was something cold and dead in his face, and his eyes sat so far back beneath his brows that they were hardly more than glints of mai-light lost in shadow.
I had only glimpsed such fury in him once, when Ana had wheedled him about his sister’s inheritance of the family spreads: But was it not Velona who bested you to win the prime seat?
If so, she’s surely a woman of strength.
I watched helplessly as Trikao moved past me and continued down the hall toward Ana’s rooms, the sword in his hand shining in the lamplight.
A keen edge, for horrid things. I raged within my flesh, howled and bellowed at the idea of him inflicting harm upon her—for Ana had, of course, reckoned that she had been conditioned as well.
She was surely sitting in her chambers as paralyzed as I was: small, vulnerable, powerless.
Then my memories shifted in my mind, trembling and quaking deep within me.
They spoke, whispering in the dark with that voice, with her voice: Breathe. And remember. Or she shall die.
I realized the meaning instantly. I took a deep breath through my nose.
Scent is the sense that is most heavy with memory, each recollection and remembrance pulled into thought by the tiniest waft of aroma.
Engravers use many distinct scents to categorize and access their memories—but there, at the top of the stairs, I breathed in deep the aromas of the Green Drover: the smell of the fretvine, the dust in the carpets, the faint reek of the mai-lamps that had not been recently cleaned.
With that scent I summoned all the memories I’d had of this tavern, every moment either mundane or frenetic as I’d pursued this investigation in these corridors.
My mind filled up with engraved memories, hundreds of thousands of them—and as it did so, the song in my ears faded. The command of the web became one memory among many. And as it did, its mesmerism receded.
With a grunt, I turned and took a step.
This simple movement was impossibly difficult, as if I was trapped within league after league of mud. My joints ached within me, like my bones were splintering in my flesh. Yet still, I picked up my foot and put it down, pursuing Trikao Armenta, however slowly.
I moved forward, putting my weight on my front foot. The fretvine beneath it creaked.
And Trikao stopped.
He paused, then turned slowly, peering at me over his shoulder. Then he watched, amazed, as I took another step, my whole body trembling and quaking with pain.
“Hum!” said Trikao. “So. You move.” He took a step forward, squinting at me. “And you see.”
I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth hurt, and then I slowly, slowly reached down and gripped my sword. I clicked it back and forth within its locking scabbard, sluggishly pushing it through its tumbler.
Trikao ambled forward like a curious passerby watching a street juggler. “I did wonder if it would affect you,” he said softly. “Those of your ilk have very different heads atop your shoulders.”
My lips trembled as I tried to speak: Down. Down. Halt and get down. Yet all I could manage was a trickle of saliva between my teeth.
“Do you have enough will to tell me where this evidence of hers is?” Trikao whispered. His eyes were like ice within his lined face. “Or—be true. Is there any evidence at all?”
My sword was unlocked. I began to draw it, but the movement was so slow, so horribly slow…
Trikao gazed upward in thought, his beard trembling as his mouth worked. “I came here with peaceful intent—only to take, no more. But you I now must kill, as you have seen me. And her I must kill to ensure she never comes so close again.”
I finally pulled the tip of my green blade free. I began to turn it, to assume a fighting stance.
Trikao gripped his short sword and raised it close to my neck. “It will be a hard thing to see Fotia grieve. But perhaps being queen of all our spreads shall be enough to appease her broken hear—”
Then Trikao dropped the sword, shrieked madly, and crumpled to the ground.
The change was so abrupt that I could hardly understand it. I watched as he thrashed in agony on the floor before me, rolling over and over and beating his arms and legs against the floor, his mouth foaming and his trousers suddenly dark with urine.
His helm rolled away, and as it did I saw a flash of his ear: stoppered up with green wax. But of course. He was infected himself. How else could he have conditioned his victims, and still resisted the lure of the song?
Then I looked up.
Ana stood in the hall just behind him, blindfolded as always—and holding a lypi lance in her hands. The tips of the tiny fangs were dark with blood.
“He set up his own bait,” sighed Ana. “And you silly bastards dashed out and bought it, didn’t you? Thank Sanctum I am at least somewhat competent!”
I stared at her. Though my body ached, all that fell to a whisper as I struggled to understand how she stood there. She was surely conditioned just as I was: wasn’t she?
I choked, grimaced, and growled the word: “How?”
“How?” she said. “How what? Oh, you’ve no skill at all for conversation in this state, Din!
It shall be a rotten time of it, like talking to a dog.
But listen! Here come the custodi, responding to Trikao’s screams. They shall get you in a better state—and then I can explain.
” She sniffed. “Or explain some, at least.”