Suddenly, he felt a stabbing pain in his heart and lost sensation. Collapsing against the door, Luca opened his mouth and tried to breathe, but his lungs weren’t working. The boy had lost control of his body.
Detected injection of paralyzing toxins!
Analyzing reaction options...
Releasing neutralizing agents.
Detected impact on nervous system!
Analyzing reaction options...
Blocking nerve receptors in compromised locations.
Detected aggressive asphyxiation influence!
Analyzing reaction options...
Cannot reinforce neck skin!
Insufficient required elements in organism!
More intuitively than consciously, Luca jerked and touched the door.
Detected available materials: 97.9% iron, 2.1% carbon...
Absorbing...
Transforming...
The hand pressing against the iron panel slipped through a hole. Luca could breathe again. The collar no longer constricted his strengthened throat, although it continued to send controlling signals to the rebellious slave’s body.
Effect level critical.
Analyzing reaction options...
Initiating absorption of aggressive structure...
Insufficient energy reserves!
By absorbing certain chemical elements and transforming them into others, reconfiguring the structure of the boy’s organs and counteracting the aggressive outside influence, his metamorphosis ability had expended all his available energy. It couldn’t use fat supplies because he didn’t have an ounce of spare fat on him, and it had no authority to absorb its masters flesh without his command. The command didn’t come, and the ability went to sleep.
Exhausted, Luca fell into a coma, and the power collar achieved its purpose: the rebel was paralyzed and close to death, and the alarm signal had been sent to the slave’s master.
Master Yadugara’s theoretical plans had worked. There was no way the creature could resist the transfusion process in this state.
Chapter 16. At the Behest of Lentz
“I MADE FRIENDS with her!” Reyna declared at the threshold and gasped in surprise. “You did it! You look wonderful, Master!”
“Oh yes, my girl! And this evening I’ll show you how young I’ve become.”
Yadugara couldn’t hold back a self-satisfied smile. He had undergone the transfusion procedure so many times, had delighted so many times in the respite it gave him, the multitude of pleasant things given only to those glowing with health and seething with the hormones of youth.
“How is the creature Dezisimu?” Reyna asked anxiously.
The healer had taught the girl from a young age to divide people into two camps: namely, people and ‘creatures.’ The impressionable girl’s eyes had widened as she listened to her master’s ‘discoveries’ of terrible monsters hiding inside human guises.
But by the will of the gods, who maintain the harmony of the world’s design, these creatures also possess something very useful to us, Reyna, he had explained. Their monstrous essence has something that allows us healers to create the elixir of youth. When the time comes, my girl, you will taste it. You will be eternally young, Reyna!
She would make an excellent wife... until he grew tired of her. The term of her slavery would end soon, but Reyna would stay with Yadugara, seeing in him everything: husband, lover, patron, defender, head of the family, and most of all — the one who would gift her immortality.
“It all went perfectly! We managed to neutralize it. We didn’t even need the new tools from Master Arden.” The healer fell silent, then remembered something and frowned. “What about Dezisimu’s sister?”
“I wandered around the district yesterday, met some locals. Karim Kovachar, the innkeeper’s boy, told me all he knew. The creature was bedridden his entire life, only occasionally going out in a wheelchair. His father was a gladiator, he died three years ago. His mother, Prisca, is a washerwoman. The creature’s sister is a year his younger. Her name is Kora. Three days ago, Dezisimu encountered Karim and suddenly stood up and attacked him.”
“Is that so...” the healer nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps Dezisimu wasn’t a beast until something possessed him... This will require thorough research! Two-horns! Cursed imperial healers!”
“Has something happened, Master?”
“It certainly has... I’ll deal with it myself. The important thing is that we get Dezisimu’s sister!”
“I made her acquaintance yesterday. I told her that her brother sent me, that he’s been punished, but asked me to meet with his family to reassure them. She believed it. I promised I’d bring her to the house so she could speak to Luca.”
“Warn Daler. He must take her at once, as soon as she comes in. We’ll accuse her of trying to burgle me.”
“As for the mother, Master...”
“Tell me the details later. For now, leave me. I must think.”
“Very well, Master!”
Reyna’s curvaceous hips swayed as she walked to the door. Master Yadugara’s gaze swept across her strong calves clad in grey stockings and smiled. The girl turned, feeling her master’s gaze.
“Master?”
“Go on, Reyna.”
She nodded and left the office. Young blood may be roaring through his veins, but he had to forget about the pleasures of the flesh for now. He didn’t know how, but the emperor’s physicians had learned of the healer’s discovery and immediately demanded the slave be taken to the palace.
Now Yadugara was waiting for Dezisimu to come round and get fed in the kitchen, so that he could at least look presentable. Bringing a half-dead slave to the palace would mean drawing the ire of Lentz, the chief of the imperial medics, and losing his healing license because of it. In the best case.
The mere fact that he had hidden from Lentz that he had found a boy suitable for transfusion threatened Yadugara with grave danger. The yarn he’d spun for Penant about ‘compatibility’ could be explained by the healer’s desire not to increase his apprentice’s sense of his own importance. All he needed was for him to go talking and trading on his uniqueness.
In addition, this saved Pen for Yadugara himself as a last resort.
We’re compatible, senior apprentice. This is a unique case! Keep this secret, otherwise my enemies will seek to do you harm! He’d said then to Pen, making him proud of his master’s trust and thrilled at a sense of unity with him.
Especially for the first few procedures, before the ageing changes began to scare the youth. Later, once the slave was free, he became senior apprentice and started to get an inkling when he looked at his wrinkles. He sought explanation. Then Yadugara had promised his apprentice that as soon as they found another ‘compatible’ option, Pen would regain his lost years of life.
In reality, the issue was not ‘compatibility’, but the mere unnatural nature of the process of transfusion. Human nature itself rose up against the forced removal of its life-giving cells! Suitable donors were very rare. Two or three dozen in an entire generation in the Empire, and Yadugara had searched for them all his life, starting out like Penant, the senior apprentice of a healer whose name he had sworn to forget. It had taken him half a century, but he’d done it.
He thanked all the gods and the Sacred Mother that the imperial healers had learned of Dezisimu only this morning. By the time they’d conferred and sent a runner, midday had passed.
But he’d done all he needed to in the night. First he’d performed the procedure on Penant, fearing new surprises, but everything went peacefully and as usual. An hour and change later, the senior apprentice was two years younger, and by midday, Yadugara himself had lost fifteen years. He could have done more, but with each fresh year, the risks rose. This was something to be approached slowly, steadily, for the health both of the donor and the recipient. Rejection was a sorry affair, but it had happened in the healer’s rich practice.
In the next couple of hours, he and Pen brought the
slave out of his coma — before the next procedure. The boy came round incredibly fast after an intravenous injection of a glucose solution. His regeneration abilities were stunning!
Then, once Luca was able to move on his own, Yadugara sent him and Pen to Moraine to eat, while he himself stayed with Reyna.
It’s time! he thought. He left his office and carefully locked the door. Went downstairs, walked into the kitchen.
Pots and pans bubbled away happily, and the slave Dezisimu sat at the table, his head bowed over a metal bowl. Nobody would have the heart to call him a boy anymore — although his figure was still childish, it nonetheless showed the signs of the transfusion procedure. His hair was dull and grey here and there, his skin dry, covered in pigment spots, his face was covered in wrinkles, his hands shook and his body hunched.
The slave ate greedily under the sympathetic gaze of Aunt Mo.
“I don’t understand how he fits so much in,” the cook said, spreading her hands. “He’s eaten a whole pot full, and it’s still not enough.”
“It’s enough. Stand, slave! Follow me. We’re leaving.”
Luca rose, took the bowl in both hands, threw back his head and drank what was left. Yadugara looked at the donor’s distended stomach and cringed with disgust.
It didn’t matter. He’d gotten his. He didn’t doubt that the imperial healers would drink Luca dry.
By the next morning, the slave Luca Dezisimu would be dead.
Chapter 17. In the Emperor’s Palace
SEVERAL PINTS of Aunt Mo’s thick aromatic stew pleasantly splashed around in Luca’s stomach. Blood rushed from his brain to his digestive tract, and the boy sleepily shuffled along, losing all sense of time and space.
In the district in which he’d spent his recent years, people didn’t go against the flow. Kora didn’t count — his sister had always been a little strange, striving for something more with no understanding of how to achieve it.
Three nights ago, Luca had been a paralyzed cripple in a slum, grateful for leftover potato skins, and in the mind of that Luca, matters were simply running their course: he had died, been revived through some miracle, received an ability from the Wheel, whose nature he didn’t entirely understand and which he didn’t strive to use. The villainous Karim and his father Nemania were bastards for accusing him as they had, it went without saying. But maybe he really had broken the innkeeper’s son’s collarbone when he threw stones. That would mean that Luca was guilty and serving out a punishment he earned. It was just of the judge to allow him to pay for the damage, and good that Master Yadugara had done so. Otherwise it would have been the mines for Luca. People don’t come back from the mines.
So thought Luca the Cripple, the seventeen-year-old Luca the Boy, who had the knowledge of a ten year old, roughly speaking. That Luca simply surrendered himself to the currents of the turbulent river that his life had become, and his capacity to be surprised by all the strange things happening to him had withered. Surprise was an emotion, and after the transfusion procedure, the boy fell into apathy, incapable not only of surprise, but of any feeling. Even his mother’s fate no longer concerned him.
But then came a moment when he, spurred on by Penant’s kicks, was following Yadugara, and happened to see himself in a mirror. Something broke through the scab of indifference then. Or rather, someone. The new personality that seemed to be melding more and more with the legacy of the traveler Esk’Onegut — that mind reeled. It didn’t matter how many reincarnations awaited him in the future. It would be better not to live than to live like this! The reflection showed who the boy had become, the mind recognized the culprit, and the brain began to feverishly think.
Outwardly, this showed only in Luca’s slightly more confident stride. He squared his shoulders and stopped shuffling along like an old man. His awakened metamorphosis studied the changes in his body and sighed. His veins, heart and liver had taken a beating, his vision and hearing were weaker, he had kidney stones and his body’s cells had aged rapidly overnight.
Luca’Onegut himself was also horrified. He and Penant climbed into a carriage and sat opposite Yadugara, and he really didn’t like what he saw in the healer’s eyes. He evaluated the man’s body language, caught a glance quickly redirected. That glance held disgust, and... pity? Luca also noted that Yadugara was dressed differently than when he went to see patients, somehow more ceremonially. And he noticed that the old man looked far younger.
Luca moved his gaze to Penant. He too looked younger, though it wasn’t as extreme with him. His wrinkles had smoothed out and he carried himself with pride. The senior apprentice’s eyes held such clear superiority that Luca nearly averted his gaze out of habit.
But he resisted. He asked a question, barely holding back his fury.
“Where are we going... master?”
Showing such respect to a person who had taken away years of his life wasn’t easy for Luca. The hesitation didn’t escape Yadugara’s eye. The healer’s hackles rose, but he considered it necessary to answer. It was no secret.
“To the Imperial Palace. His medics want to examine you. And enough questions, slave. I forbid you to ask more.”
Buildings, signs and richly dressed people flashed by behind the small window. The horse slowed its pace. The path to the palace led upwards, to the cliff of Ma Ju Ro the First, the Ruler, the founder of the imperial family, but the boy knew none of this. The Imperial Palace had always been a distant concept to him. Luca knew the place existed, but he had never seen it in all his life.
He stayed silent for the rest of the trip, as his ‘master’ wished. He wasn’t just sitting quietly, though. He was carefully studying his ‘logs’ (a word that came unbidden from his inherited memory again) of what had happened to him in the last few days. In prison he had wished for a fist of iron, and his ability had reacted with a message that it didn’t have enough iron available.
Which meant...
Luca covered his right fist with his other hand and thought about having longer nails, and more durable — steel ones, for example. Maybe a foot long, sharp and deadly, capable of cutting... cutting off that damn slave collar!
Crack!
Something burst under the wheels of the carriage, maybe some kind of fruit, and a displeased murmur came from the driver at the front.
“Careful, you! You’re driving the master!” Penant shouted, turning round.
And nothing more happened. No messages in Luca’s eyes, no changes. He’d interpreted something wrongly, but what?
He immersed himself in the text once more. Ah, there it was. Yadugara had somehow initiated a transfusion of life force and run into the defenses his ability had mounted... And the best defense is a good offense, as his father had said. The metamorphosis had reversed the process, and Yadugara had almost died, not only returning everything he had taken, but giving away some of his own years.
Luca frowned. From the legacy in his mind came vague memories of certain extremely unpleasant nocturnal creatures of a certain world, who extended their own lives by drinking the blood of victims. He had to admit, Yadugara’s methods were far more elegant. And apparently more effective.
As it turned out, it would have been possible to escape from the healer’s basement. All he had to do was absorb those two chinils that had lost their limbs, then break down the door. He was sure he could have strengthened his fists enough to do it, though he didn’t know where that confidence came from. He shouldn’t have tried to tear the collar off right away. He should have gained strength and tried to absorb it or get rid of it some other way. However, he still had time.
But first he needed to understand how to control his metamorphosis. It was clear that the ability was focused on improving its carrier’s survival chances. When there was a direct threat to his health, his metamorphosis switched on and used everything it had to hand.
Right now, the leather collar, even strengthened as it was with its control circuit, wasn’t a direct threat. But when the collar attacked his n
ervous system and injected him with paralyzing toxins, the metamorphosis fought back. It was a shame that it had exhausted his energy so fast — the consequences of a whole day without a single bite to eat — and gone to sleep.
Luca touched the collar reflexively, imagining it as an enemy with a mind and the ability to kill him.
The pseudo-intelligent collar felt the interference in its control center and anxiously tightened. Luca wheezed. Penant, recalling the slave’s oddities, shied away to the edge of his seat.
Initiating absorption of aggressive structure...
Yadugara frowned suspiciously and looked him in the eyes. He hissed through his teeth.
“Whatever you’re thinking of doing, slave, I order you cease at once!”
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