CHAPTER 13 #3
Ferron pulled Helena to her feet and dragged her up a series of steps she could barely make out before shoving her to her knees again.
Helena stared in horror at the sight before her. She barely recognised the grotesque shape.
Morrough lay reclined upon a throne of bodies.
Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him.
Morrough seemed shrunken somehow from the immense distorted being he’d been.
Now he looked as though the skin was rotting off him.
One of the faces in the throne was briefly illuminated in the dim light, and Helena thought it might be Mandl’s old face, but she couldn’t be sure because the throne shifted, lifting Morrough towards her.
Morrough tilted his head, his empty sockets like blackened holes. “Have I thought too well of you, High Reeve? I wanted those memories by now, and you’ve brought me only scraps.”
There was something wrong with Morrough’s tongue, the words slurred as if he were speaking around some large object in his mouth.
“I apologise. I will strive to do better.”
“Yes, you are always striving, aren’t you?” The words did not seem kindly meant. “I shall inspect these memories myself. Hold her fast.”
There was a pause, and the only sound was the heaving of the decayed bodies. Another face appeared, half rotted, but she recognised the wide scar that ran along the side of Titus Bayard’s skull.
Before she could shrink back, Ferron’s knee lodged between her shoulder blades and his hands wrapped around her jaw, holding her in place.
Morrough extended his decrepit right hand, over-large with fingers jointed like spider legs. The bones were emerging through the tips of his fingers, except for two which hung limp, dangling strips of flesh.
The resonance that struck Helena was blistering in its power. It jolted through her like a live wire, charring her from the inside. Her body spasmed, jerking violently.
She screamed through her teeth as it ravaged its way through her skull.
Morrough’s examination of her memories wasn’t some disorienting state of reliving; it was like having her consciousness flayed. Morrough peeled her mind apart, ripping her memories from wherever he found them.
While he’d said he wanted to see the lost memories, he seemed in no hurry to find them, instead focusing his attention on her imprisonment at Spirefell.
The claustrophobic monotony, the endless isolation, punctuated only by Ferron’s occasional appearance to check her memories or perform transference.
Morrough seemed particularly interested in the transference sessions and the nightmares and fevers that followed. He found her fears amusing and the agony of transference a novelty, replaying it over and over, Ferron crushing and consuming her until there was no end or beginning of either of them.
It was only when she’d stopped screaming and gone limp, no longer struggling at all, that he finally turned to the glimmers of memory, but even those he distorted.
Luc on the roof, but stripped of all the details that had made the memory beautiful: the white fire, the light in his eyes, the gilding of the city at sunset, each disappeared until all that remained was the distance between them, the way Luc recoiled from her, the reproach in his voice, and the drug washing him away.
Morrough watched the memory of Lila asking about the trainees several times with a sort of idle curiosity, but it was her memory of Lila scarred and crying that he took the greatest interest in.
When he tired of it, she hoped he was done, but he was not. He went back to the last transference session.
Whatever power she’d briefly possessed to push Ferron from her mind failed her now. Morrough stretched the memory, drawing out every excruciating moment of Ferron’s mental violation, the backlash from her attempted resistance, until she didn’t even realise when he finally stopped.
Her mind was awash in so much pain that it blotted out everything else until she grew aware of her lungs seizing. Her eyes unable to focus. She had no sense of where she was until she felt her pulse fluttering against the pressure of Ferron’s fingers, his knee pressed against her spine.
“So …” Morrough’s voice came from somewhere in the dark. “The Eternal Flame’s animancer is not dead after all.”
“You believe Boyle is still alive?” Ferron sounded startled.
“Who?”
Ferron loosened his grip on Helena, and she slumped against him in the suffocating darkness. “Stroud mentioned her. Based on the Resistance records of Elain Boyle, it was presumed that she—”
“Boyle was no one. Haven’t you noticed that the transference was different with the others?”
Helena’s eyebrows furrowed. Others?
“I was told that the transmutations in her mind would cause difficulty,” Ferron said.
“Those difficulties are because she is resisting, because she can resist. This—she is the animancer.”
There was a pause punctuated only by the heaving rhythm of necrothralls. Ferron seemed frozen with surprise.
“You did not notice, or even suspect?” Morrough sounded so enraged, he had to pause to catch his breath.
“I had wondered at your progress, the reported intensity of the brain fevers in her, unlike our test subjects. How could so much be concealed if the mere penetration of her mind is so difficult?”
Morrough spoke so slowly that dread seemed to build with his every word. Ferron remained silent.
“There is only one answer: She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all but gone, she is still resisting. She erased her memory of what she is in an attempt to escape me.”
The pressure growing in Helena’s head was so intense, her vision disappeared.
“Surely not.” Ferron’s voice broke through. “Stroud said it was impossible for any person to erase their own—”
“What does Stroud know of anything? She cannot imagine talent beyond her own abilities. This is the animancer. I could feel her attempts to resist me.” The corpses oozed Morrough towards Helena again, his eye sockets looming, his resonance a sharp hum in her bones.
“I beg your forgiveness for my failure,” Ferron said, his voice sounding hoarse with shock. “I never considered it.”
Morrough was silent for a long time, his skeletal face bloated and rippling in her vision.
“Your father was recently here, begging for an audience as you now beg for forgiveness. He claims he tried to tell you what he remembered, but you did not listen.”
Ferron’s grip on Helena tightened again. “His memory is hardly reliable, Your Eminence. It seemed imprudent to indulge his fits of paranoia. I did not realise he would disturb you with his claims. However … I did quietly begin a reinvestigation due to his comments.”
“And …”
“It would seem that she was apprehended near the West Port shortly after the bombing.”
“To rescue the Bayard paladin?”
“A bombing seems a careless method of rescue. The paladin’s escape may have been coincidental. As you recall, Bayard was already dying when I captured her.”
“It was because of Bayard. I am sure.”
Helena’s mind throbbed as she tried to understand what they were saying.
A rasping, wheezing sigh rose from all the bodies at once. “All this time we thought Hevgoss … but it was the Eternal Flame after all. They must have caught on to him.”
“Surely if they’d realised, they wouldn’t have allowed their Headquarters to be so easily taken.”
“Perhaps …” Morrough did not sound convinced. “But that is not for you to decide. I determine what was pointless. This proves that the Eternal Flame was more cunning than we thought. I suspect our captive animancer knows far more than she realises.”
“Then I will continue to break her,” Ferron said. He started to pull Helena up from the floor to drag her away.
“Did I give you leave to go?” Morrough’s body was suddenly raised high, his massive, distorted form now looming over them both.
He was barely clothed, and his skin sagged, rotting off him so that Helena could see his organs pulsing where it tore away.
Bright beneath the decaying flesh. She stared dazedly.
There were too many bones, some greyish and crumbling, others white.
Morrough’s wasted hand fell on Ferron’s shoulder. “You are growing presumptuous, High Reeve.”
Ferron instantly released Helena. She dropped to the ground at his feet. It was warm, and something wet clung to her skin, seeping through her clothes. She could smell viscera and old blood. In the darkness, cold fingers tugged at her dress as the throne morphed with another rasping, rotting heave.
“How can I trust someone who presumes and overlooks as much as you have of late?”
Ferron drew a sharp breath.
“Your failures seem to be multiplying. Overlooking your prisoner’s signs of animancy. Ignoring your father’s counsel. And where are the assassins that I ordered you to find?”
The copper-tanged rot in the air choked Helena as the darkness closed around her, cold dead fingers scrabbling, trying to drag her deeper. All her fears coming to life.
“I am your most loyal servant. I will not fail you. If it was the Eternal Flame, I will find them.”
“It was the Eternal Flame. Who else could it be? Who would dare to kill the Undying? The weapon was obsidian. Crowther is ours now, but he must have shared the secrets with someone overlooked during the purge. Perhaps their identity is one of the secrets our captive animancer is trying so hard to keep from us.”
As Morrough spoke, the resonance in the air became a solid, weighted mass bearing down. Helena’s ribs bowed under the pressure, threatening to snap inwards and shred her lungs.
“Mandl’s death was a humiliation. For one so illustrious, you should have foreseen it.”
The pressure eased enough for Helena to manage one desperate breath, but the miasma coated her throat, choking her.