Chapter 35
I awoke to music and shadow and strange plays of light.
The swell and lulls of an orchestra drifted around me, melancholy and brimming with emotion.
Lewis watched from a doorway, his cap under his arm and his eyes overbright, his focus somewhere beyond the stage where the Kessan Opera from the other night played out.
I drifted past him in my opera gown, my gaze equally distant. Wake strode hard on my heels, a forceful hand on my back, and I felt the surge of Lewis’s ire.
“Illing,” Madge’s voice called.
The music changed, shifting into a faster, more harried movement.
I saw Lewis and I at the Guild’s engagement ball, dancing with a dozen other couples.
Skirts swirled. Backs arched. Lewis’s eyes trailed from my lips down the smooth skin of my throat, to the hollow of my collar and the swell of my breasts.
Another shift in melody, simplifying, growing more distant.
A gramophone in a tent on the edge of the world.
A stack of letters covered with my writing, neatly stacked on a crate beside a perfectly made cot.
Lewis shaving at a small, jury-rigged mirror, a sketch of Hieronymus that I had sent him pinned beside it.
“Ottilie?” his voice rasped.
I closed my eyes, but nothing changed. I opened them again and saw a woman standing over me, dressed in the Kessan fashion with a fitted jacket and small bustle beneath her straight skirts.
“She survived,” the woman said to someone I could not see. I tried to turn my head, but could not. “Dim the lanterns.”
My consciousness flickered as the lights dimmed and the woman disappeared. I blinked, and she was back again, and my threads were twining in an artificial twilight. I felt them rise across my throat, my jaw, down my temples.
But the sensation did not stop there. It prickled across my collarbones, my shoulders, and down across my chest towards my stomach.
It felt like trails of water, hot and just on the edge of burning, and as it spread memories whispered to me—not from any object that I could sense, though I understood that I lay on a hard surface. They seemed to cling to the air itself.
My consciousness drifted again, and when I next came to my senses, I lay on a divan.
I squinted around myself, disoriented. I was in a large study, shelves packed with books and tables layered with instruments. There was a desk to one side, illuminated by a green glass lamp, and diagrams were pinned to the walls over bloody red, vaguely floral wallpaper.
Hand-sketched anatomical diagrams of men and women were on the table, just legible from where I lay.
Diagrams of threads twining necks and shoulders, some even spreading down backs and entirely across faces.
Others were charts and lists. My eyes struggled to focus on the words, but I made out the titles ‘Of the Sun’ and ‘Of the Moon.’ Entwined classifications.
I held very, very still. Had I somehow fallen into the hands of the Guild? Had Lewis and I been rescued from one den of villainy, by another?
Lewis.
I looked around sharply. I was alone—no, just then I heard movement. A woman shifted into sight, riffling through a stack of papers.
I closed my eyes again, memory churning. I knew her, but it took me a moment to remember where from.
From my delirium. For I had been delirious, I recognized that now.
She survived.
I sat up sharply. Or rather, I intended to. Instead, I managed to throw myself ungracefully onto the floor. Cheek mashed into a serviceable carpet, I wheezed.
Footsteps approached and the woman looked down at me, brows furrowed. “Your sedative has yet to wear off,” she advised. “I shall fetch you more. Do not try to move.”
With that she moved off, out of my sight but in the direction of the desk.
“Pardon—No!” I croaked. “Where is Lewis?”
I heard riffling in drawers, and the clink of bottles. “Try not to speak, either.”
“I demand to know where he is,” I persisted, regaining a little more of myself. There was little point in attempting dignity, not prone on the floor as I was, and I squirmed relentlessly, trying to sit up. “I demand to speak to Madge!”
“Who?” the woman’s voice inquired curiously. I heard several footsteps as she retraced her steps a few paces, still out of sight.
“Margaret Rushforth. Margaret Moran.”
“Oh, your Golden sister? She is still at large,” the woman replied.
The meaning of that sank in slowly. Though I had finally regained some control of my arms, I quickly stilled again, hiding my advantage.
“This is not the Guild,” I observed.
Her response was distracted. “No, no. I work for the Grand General. You are in his care.”
With dawning horror, I took in the study again.
From the perspective of the floor, where I still lay prone, I noted the ceiling was of red stone.
Pre-imperial. Furthermore, there were no windows.
We were still in the Old Citadel dungeons.
And this woman’s obviously diligent study of the Entwined, combined with my delirium and fragments of memory painted a horrible, unsettling picture.
“What have you done to me?” I asked.
She survived.
Had Lewis?
The woman approached, a cloth in one hand and a bottle in the other.
“I have, in theory, nullified your Entwined characteristics,” she said as she poured something from the bottle onto the cloth, something amber and thick.
She smiled. “Reducing you to a mere mortal, like myself. It was my notion, that the power that creates Entwined might also uncreate them. Securing Adepts to test my theories on has been difficult but… here you are.”
She sounded smug, as if she expected me to be impressed.
I just stared. Nullified? But Baffin’s intent was to amplify magicless humanity. The Guild’s was to amplify already powerful Entwined. Could there be a third purpose?
If there was, Wake had lied to me. Or did he not know?
The woman carried on, “Your threads no longer respond to faux twilight, which is promising. But that may be a temporary effect, of course. We will need to observe you in true twilight before I can draw any conclusions. Now, one deep breath, here we are…”
She crouched and reached to clamp the cloth over my face.
I grabbed her wrist and pulled. She toppled forward, smashing her face on the carved wood of the divan.
I staggered to my feet, jerked the cloth from her grasp and pinned it over her own, disoriented face. She writhed and tried to scream—I clamped her to my legs and held the cloth fast, ignoring how her nails gored my hands and forearms, and how rapidly my body began to quiver with fatigue.
The woman convulsed, scrabbling more weakly, then stilled.
As she fell away from me, I realized my clothing had been changed. I wore something like a sleeping gown, simple and of grey fabric, with buttons all the way down the front. My own clothing, from corset to stockings, was nowhere to be seen.
A sickly, constricting feeling of violation wrapped around me. I furiously tossed the drugged cloth aside and hobbled to the desk, desperate to see what the woman had been looking at when I awoke.
Somehow, I suspected what I would see there. Amid inkwell, notebooks, and bottles was a fresh sheet of paper, newly inked with a diagram of threads on a simplistic but nude female form. The pattern of the threads from her temples to collarbones was unmistakably familiar.
I tore the sheet apart, hands shaking. Beneath was another sheet with the same figure—me—but this time marked with fewer threads, only on her throat. Belatedly, I noticed a time and date in the corner.
I flicked my gaze to the clock on the wall. Five hours ago.
I tossed that diagram aside and looked at the final one. No threads, with the time of notation less than half an hour ago.
I reached up to touch my throat. I felt nothing there. But the lamplight was bright. I would not expect my threads to awaken under these circumstances.
Strengthening, I returned to the woman and put a hand on her bare head.
Memories trickled into my mind, but they were gossamer and mist, indistinct in shape and devoid of sound or sensations.
That did not bode well. Throat thick, I glanced around and noted the mechanism for the oil lamps, beside the door.
I turned the lamps lower. The sound of my movements, the hiss of flame, and the ticking of the clock were the only sounds.
The latter itched at the back of my mind, warning I hadn’t much time, that someone would come along soon, or the woman would wake up—though the last seemed doubtful, given how limp she was.
When I was wrapped in faux twilight, I stood over the Kessan woman. Crouching down, I took both sides of her head in my hands, hard enough to bruise—I hoped—and focused.
More memories swam towards me. I saw myself from her perspective, clothing unbuttoned, cold and exposed.
I dug my nails into her skin in vengeance.
I saw her writing, a stream of notes and diagrams. Then, finally, Lewis, on a familiar cot.
He had still been in the cell when this memory was formed.
I could not see back far—this was hours ago, at most.
I dropped the woman’s head roughly and set to ransacking her pockets. I would have taken her clothing, but there was not enough time for that. What I needed were keys.
I found none on her. I returned to the desk and searched the drawers. A clatter. I triumphantly took up a ring of keys, and caught my breath at what lay beneath. A Guild medallion. Lewis’s Guild medallion.
I pocketed both and glanced around the room again.