Chapter Twelve #2
“You do not know me as well as you think.” He spat a gobbet of phlegm and wine onto my bony bonce, then took a pouch from his pocket. Ground-up dragon bone. Magic radiated from it like heat from a fire. It was power and wonder and mystery in a handful of dust.
He muttered an incantation.
I took back everything I ever said about his skills at sorcery.
Flesh sprouted on my skull like fast-growing moss.
A thousand tiny tendrils burrowed into the bone.
It tickled as it went, a wave of aliveness washing over my pate.
It was a sensation beyond anything humans are equipped to experience.
A torrent of muscles and sinews took root in my jaw, and suddenly I had a tongue again, and taste!
Light blasted me as eyes grew like pearls in the hollow of my sockets, and mercifully eyelids followed shortly thereafter.
Bones! More bones! Vertebrae, one two three and more.
Ribs, how delightful! The hint of a flashed scapula, like a striptease that went much too far only in reverse.
Lungs! I am a man who knows what lungs feel like when they fill for the first time.
Babies wail when they’re born – I laughed with joy.
I was undeniably grotesque. Still limbless, so I must have resembled a potted plant drenched in blood and giblets, topped with a face that looked like a butcher’s child had been allowed to play with the leftovers.
I was not a pleasant sight, but I felt absolutely, transcendently wonderful. I was alive again!
Orphir stopped chanting.
The spell paused. I was unfinished, no more than a half-formed torso and a dizzied head, but alive! I had unsightly gaping wounds where my limbs should go, not to mention my unplumbed fundaments, but magic elided over such mundane issues for now. I was alive!
I took my first proper breath, opened my new mouth, rolled my very first words around my old familiar teeth.
“My old friend,” I said with more enthusiasm than I expected.
Orphir speared a grape on his fork and popped it into my mouth. It was delight on my tongue.
More, I begged him, and he offered me slivers of everything on the table.
A bit of carrot nearly broke my mind; it was a mountain of flavours and textures so vast that consuming it was all-consuming.
I could divide my existence not into my life, death and rebirth, not by years or decades, but by Before Carrot and After Carrot.
That carrot was ruinous with joy, but more was to come.
A scrap of meat! A scrap of meat was salt and fire and red life-craving.
In tasting it, I ran with every wolf pack in the wide world, with every fanged Denizen in the Dungeon dark.
Water! Ah! Water was joy itself.
“Better than Dungeon dust,” said Orphir, refilling his wine glass. “I will not say we were foolish when we went in search of lost magic, but magic alone will not slake a man’s thirst. In our folly we missed the second half of the formula – turning magic into profit.”
“Indubitably,” I agreed. “Profit and, ah, legs?”
“In time. We have not concluded our negotiation.”
“An administrative assistant, you said. Some light paperwork, a little spell-craft, helping dig you out of the mess you’ve made for yourself.”
I was so drunk on my new body that Orphir’s request seemed dizzyingly reasonable.
“I can do all that,” I assured him. “Would you pour me a glass, too, or, better yet, grow me an arm so I can do it myself?”
“I want something else from you, Cornelius. The child. Ealdufrida or Bait or . . . ah, call her what you will. I know she laired with you for a time. Where is the child?”
“You will not find her. She’s not in the dragon’s belly where you tried to leave her. She might be anywhere below.”
He scowled at the reminder of his mistake. “I – that is to say, we need her, my friend. My hold on the kingdom runs through the Princess Aldebara—”
“The changeling you made?”
Orphir stiffened in shock, then worked out how I knew.
Few in the upper world had any reason to suspect the Princess Aldebara was anything other than what she appeared to be.
Only in the Dungeon did we have a snot-nosed, stubborn and troublesome counter-argument.
He sipped his wine. “Keep your voice down, you idiot. Yes, the princess I rescued. She is ill. I need the other to cure her. Where is she?”
“I have been asking myself that daily for a decade. Anywhere and everywhere below. You have no idea how hard it is to keep track of that child.”
“Cornelius,” he said, “I have given you a neck again, and we shall hang side by side if it comes to it. By the by, I may have told Nala and my other acolytes that it was you who made the changeling in the first place.” He leaned forward.
“Without the child, everything falls apart. For your sake as well as mine, where would she go?”
I knew, of course. We’d spoken of it often enough. It was the key to the Dungeon, the last refuge of Yrn Kyos. I did not know then about the ghast’s machinations, but I could guess.
I hesitated on the threshold of betrayal.
“I don’t know.”
“I shall give you time to think,” he said.
He spoke a word of power as he left. The door slammed shut and locked. So did the shutters on the window. I was all alone in the tower room.
I could smell the food, but not reach it. For a while, I could see the wine, but not taste it, then the fire in the grate guttered and went out and all was dark – truly dark, to my conjured all-too-human eyes.
Long was that night.
Pain would have been easier. If Orphir had used force on me, if he’d brought vices and hot pokers and spiky things, then I could have defied him, and found strength in that defiance.
When you have nothing else, there’s always spite.
But he was, after a fashion, generous. He used temptation, and I have always been so very good at justifying my desires.
The con artist cons himself first of all.