Geraad's speculations. His hopes, and fears, and fragile determination.
Enkhaelen hissed a breath and dropped the arrowhead on the table. His eyes were hollow, unfocused, his face clenched like a fist. “I don't know why he cared,” he murmured. “Why he came after me. Trusted me. He shouldn't have. I don't even trust me.”
Uncomfortable, Cob glanced to Drakisa, who gave him an infinitesimal shrug. He hadn't meant to turn the conversation down this path, so he reached for the arrowhead, thinking to slide it back into hiding. Then he realized, “You liked him.”
Enkhaelen gave Cob a cold look. “Of course I liked him. He was a decent person, and he shouldn't have been involved in this. I told him to stay behind—I gave him the keys to all my laboratories, my libraries. He followed me instead. Why would he do that?”
He seemed serious, and Cob grimaced as he pulled the cord back over his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Maybe because you helped him. With his hands, right?”
“I fixed them, yes. What does that matter? It had to be done.”
“Well, why did y'do that?”
The necromancer shrugged and gestured vaguely. “They had healed wrong. I don't like seeing that. It's not professional. If you're trying to imply that I had specific personal reasons for healing him, the answer is no. I'm sure he understood that.”
Cob eyed him. “Sure, like the Trifolders think it's jus' professionalism that you healed up Matriarch Aglavyn. Totally not tryin' to get on their good side.”
Enkhaelen snorted. “One mended Matriarch does not sate a grudge. We'll fight again.”
“Why? Because you wanna?”
“Because they intrude on my business, and this was not my question. Why would Geraad Iskaen, a completely normal and sane individual, decide to follow me into the Palace against my orders?”
“Because...he liked you too?”
“Why?”
“I dunno. I don't like you, how d'you expect me to tell?”
Enkhaelen lifted his hands and slumped back in his chair, then looked to Drakisa in appeal. “Do you like me?”
Wearing a strained look, the scryer said diplomatically, “I appreciate your nature and skills, and prefer to be on your side in most situations.”
“See, that makes sense,” said the necromancer, gesturing toward her as he looked back to Cob. “And you make sense—or made sense, up until that point where you failed to kill me. I suppose from a practical standpoint I can understand your actions, but...”
“You want people t' hate and kill you?”
“Not that they would succeed, but it makes more sense.”
And now I have a headache. “Look,” Cob said, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “all folks're different. I'm sure there's people out there who like the kinda crazy you are. You had a wife, right?”
Enkhaelen's expression closed up again.
“Sorry—sorry,” Cob said quickly. “I mean, I know what happened. I jus'… There had to be some reason she married you in the first place, right?”
Enkhaelen looked away, left thumb toying with the silver band on his ringfinger.
Desperate, Cob glanced to Drakisa, but she had settled back with her cup of tea, hiding most of her expression behind it. Arik was no help either, just sitting there with ears perked.
“How d'you even marry an elemental anyway?” Cob finished lamely.
Enkhaelen stayed silent for so long that Cob considered excusing himself and hiding in the guest room. But the clank of pots and utensils filled the kitchen-area, the cooking scents making him too hungry to outright flee, so he just fidgeted instead.
Finally, Enkhaelen said, “The Muriae used to send their 'children' down into the human lands to learn about us. She was young—maybe five or six decades since she'd been cut from the main vein. I was...twenty-eight. She was contracted to kill me.” He tapped his deeply scarred brow. “It didn't take. When other enemies caught me, she visited me. I think she wanted to understand why we did what we did. She didn't like what I told her about my captors. We ran away together into the east.”
Cob waited for him to continue, but Enkhaelen just picked up his cup and drank. His fingers, clenched stark around the painted ceramic, were the only sign of tension in him now; the rest brooded, his attention far away.
“So then you got her pregnant?” Drakisa prompted.
Enkhaelen snorted. “What? How do you expect that would work?”
The scryer spread her hands, then reclasped them around her teacup. “You do have a daughter, yes?”
“Yes. I made her.”
“Not in the…”
“The standard biological way, no. Elementals don't have genders any more than wraiths do. Jessamyn presented as female by choice. For the aesthetics, I think—she liked dresses, dressy armor, delicate styles, even if she could kick through a door. Mariss took after her in that. ...Takes.” His eyes went distant again. “I liked it, you know? Grace and beauty and destructive power. I wouldn't have minded if she was male, but… Anyway. No, you can't have standard sex with an elemental, and you certainly can't conceive. I know how my line was made, and Jeronek's, but both took magic and required a human womb to develop in.
“We didn't have that, so I just...made Mariss. Spun her from Jess's silver and my flesh, once I'd tamped down the fire as far as I could. Didn't want to inflict my unbalanced nature on her—my inferno. A spark was enough.
“And she was perfect. Wasn't a she at first—we let her choose that. She wanted to be like her mother. I wanted that too. Better not to copy me. Better to be something stronger, and wiser.
“And then...well. You know.”
His gaze landed on Cob for that, but it was Drakisa who spoke. “You made her? Like a construct?”
“Not like a construct. Her own will, her own soul—as alive and individual as any human. Same techniques I used to make Prince Kelturin. He's not biological either; how could he be? Incubated in the Empress's womb, yes, but I had to combine their substances by hand, Aradys's and hers and a bit of mine to blend them. And his soul is human. Actually, he might be more me than Aradys.”
Cob stared. Drakisa stared too.
Before responses could be formulated, a pair of wire-framed wading bird constructs trooped over to pull plates and goblets and cutlery from the racks in their backs and place them neatly with their beaks. Then came the servers: squat, bipedal stone bears with platters balanced on their flattened heads and shoulders, and bottles dangling from the carry-hooks embedded in their chests. Their joints rasped as they set out the dishes.
Cob leaned away from them, uneasy. He could feel the magic in them, but something more besides—as if there were souls bound inside those wires and bolted into that stone. Not wanting to make trouble, he focused on finding vegetables among the platters, a task made difficult by the unfamiliar sauces.
The others had no trouble. Arik found a sausage dish in a thick green sauce. Enkhaelen claimed the forepart of a large broiled fish, apparently for the purpose of stabbing it. Drakisa picked her morsels with the assistance of a smaller wading-bird, which offered her tongs and ladles at need; soon her plate was full of round fried things and sections of fish and odd slick-looking brownish ribbons.
“Um,” said Cob.
“He needs plants,” Enkhaelen noted, spearing the fish through the spine with his fork. A careful twist and he popped the head off, then stabbed it through the skull and lifted it as if to examine a specimen.
“Ah, herbivore?” Selecting a long fork from the bird, Drakisa started pointing things out. “Sea vegetables, pickled greens, diced gourd and apple with nuts in mild sauce, fried baby eggvine. Shaidaxi, you should have told me.”
Enkhaelen shrugged, still turning his fish-head about on his fork.
“And stop playing.”
A flick of his fingers and the fish's jaw waggled independently, the broiled eyes twitching in their sockets. “I'm not playing,” said the necromancer. “I am defiling the corpse of my hated foe.”
&nbs
p; “Well, stop.”
“You shouldn't have given me something with a head.”
“If you get sauce everywhere, I will drown you in the tub.”
Enkhaelen just smirked and set his fish-head back on the plate, then forked away flakes of its flesh as the eyes continued to twitch. Grimacing, Cob focused on the bowls Drakisa had indicated, their sour and briny scents filling his nostrils.
“Not really the season for you,” Drakisa said as she added one of those fried balls to his plate. “Eggvine, don't be afraid of it. No actual eggs involved. They're not usually so small, but the spring crop was already dying from all this darkness, so our cultivators have been harvesting them young. A tad bitter, but what can one do? At least the fisheries are fine. Apparently the oilfish and the other light-lovers have been rising to our lamps in record numbers.”
“Glad it's not a total loss,” said Enkhaelen, tapping his mug, “though I would have preferred a plant oil or that butter drink. Fish oil leaves such an aftertaste.”
“You get what we can spare,” she replied primly. “Since you drink it by the bottle.”
“Bah.”
“You two are friends?” Cob hazarded, having wondered.
“Associates,” said Drakisa, fried eggvine on her fork. “He doesn't have friends. I'm sure you can see why.”
“Slander.”
She went on, “I recognized his spirit when we met at the Citadel and confronted him—unwisely, but I was young and rash. He could have killed me, which would have been well within his rights; Aekarlis and Aesangat are known to operate incognito, and we're not supposed to compromise them. But I did, and he generously deigned not to eat me, for some obscure and mysterious reason...”
“Boredom.”
“And so we continued to associate, and eventually both attained seats on the Council. After that, well, what can I say? I did my job, and he did his.”
“She was a spy,” Enkhaelen commented around a mouthful of fish. “Mage and shaman, serving the Senivaten. Young then—what were you when we met, teens, twenties?”
“Twenty-two, I think.”
“Mm. I didn't have much interest in the Gejarans. My father was one, but I barely knew him and that was ages ago. Still, I figured I’d take any allies against the Emperor. Never called them in, obviously, until now.”
“The Senivaten are still wary of you,” Drakisa added. “I've stood them off for the moment, but leaving soon would indeed be wise.”
Enkhaelen smirked. “Eat up, Cob. We might not have another hot meal for a while.”
Ignoring him, Cob focused on Drakisa. “You were comfortable workin' with him even though he wanted to kill so many people?”
Drakisa sighed and reached for her wine-goblet. “We did discuss this. He is what he is. And we have no love for the Empire. The Senivaten might have ratified the Treaty of the Pinch, but that doesn't mean we planned to stand by it. Your Empire was a bloated beast, gorging itself on the bodies of its weak neighbors; eventually it would have turned its teeth on us. We've supported Krovichanka since the beginning of their war with your northern line, and they told us many interesting things about your troops. But that is not a dinner-table subject.”
“I already know, since I made them,” said the necromancer.
“Yes, we are well aware.”
“And y'can't stop them? All the ones still fightin'?”
Enkhaelen shrugged to Cob. “Of course I can—individually, in person. But they're not bound to me. The Palace held the templates, the Palace did the work. I merely designed them. If they come after me, yes, I can wipe them out in a heartbeat. But from afar, while we have more important things to do? Let them be. The darkness will take care of them eventually.”
“Y'don't care about everyone they're gonna hurt—everyone they've already hurt because of you?”
Enkhaelen laughed sharply. “Cob, child, you can't pour the wine back into the bottle once it's been smashed all over the floor. There is nothing I can do but what we're already doing. If you're fussed because I don't seem contrite enough, you'll have to stay that way. I don't do contrition, and I'm tired of regret.”
“Not for Geraad though, huh.”
A hard light sparked in the necromancer's eyes. “Do you mourn all the men whose heads you smashed while in the Guardian state, or only your precious friends? Would you rather I prance around saving individual Kroviks from the ravages of my creations, or shall I actually try to bring back the sun? You can't have it both ways. I've cursed the world for the sake of one person before. You don't want me to do it again.”
Cob looked down at his plate, unhappy but chastened. The necromancer's words were true enough—and they'd undertaken this mission at Cob's own prompting. He could have cut Enkhaelen's head off in the Palace, let the Seals snap back, and called it done. Instead he'd chosen this road and this company.
After a moment, Enkhaelen sighed. “Look, Cob, don't put yourself in a mood over it. We'll deal with trouble as it crosses our path, and once we're done with the Seals, we'll go looking for more. I have no qualms about eradicating the misbegotten results of my work.”
“Like Das? Darilan?”
The necromancer gestured dismissively. “Different work.”
“How? Jus' because you had a direct hand in it?”
“Yes.”
“But...” Cob's words dried up. It didn't seem right for Enkhaelen to condemn all the other abominations, but at the same time, he'd just been calling them enemies. He didn't know how he felt about this anymore.
“Can we not discuss this at the table?” inserted Drakisa.
“Sorry.”
The rest of the meal passed quietly, Cob fixing his attention on the food and the two mages occasionally exchanging words in Gheshvan. He saw Arik's ears perk but didn't bother to ask. If they didn't want him to take part in the conversation, he wouldn't force himself in.
Finally, Drakisa sat back and made a complex gesture, and the waiting constructs creaked and grated back to life. One bear stepped in too close as it reached to take a plate, and as Cob recoiled, his missing hand brushed—
cold knotted tendrils, sinewy and strong, moving in confident accordance with a pattern
—right through its head.
He jerked back in his seat, staring at it. Whatever he'd touched, it was alive inside the dead stone, encased in magic. “Is that— Is a spirit in there?”
Offering her used fork to one of the birds, Drakisa said, “Of course. These are entirely operated by spirits and elementals. Not in the way that wretch Salandry used them; we don't practice that kind of summoning here.”
“Uh, what kind?”
“Chaining an elemental or spirit to an object,” supplied Enkhaelen. “Forcing them to rely on you for the energy to live. It's quite possible to use them in magic without being a shit about it.”
“You just have to entice them instead.” Drakisa gestured ceilingward. “Like in our towers. All of the air-flow is provided by wind wisps and cloud-serpents, voluntarily, because the ducting is made like a playground maze. They have very short attention spans, but if we make it just fascinating enough, they'll do a full loop before heading back outside.”
Leaning back to let a bird take his plate, Enkhaelen said, “The whole city is like that, isn't it? Thus all the detailing on the buildings, the nooks and crannies for spirits to nest in. They feed on the city's ambient energies, then spin the wheels and stoke the fires and power the lights for their own entertainment. Symbiosis. Salandry's way was just tyranny—but that's typical of the Silent Circle.”
Cob nodded slowly. It seemed like a lot of extra effort, but not being a tyrant was a good goal. “So...all kinds of elementals then? It's just, aren't the earth and metal ones...people?”
“They are,” said Enkhaelen.
“But there are different grades of elemental,” Drakisa put in. “Air and fire are too ephemeral to be people—present company excepted—but water, wood and earth are stable enough to build or grow i
nto a type of sentience. Very small ones, like the rock phosphors and slimes and walker-vines, don't have any particular intelligence, but as they aggregate, or if they originate from a larger structure like a tree or a mineral vein, they gain more ability to reason. The greater earthkin are like that, and I believe all the metal-folk come from lodes; there are no little mindless ones skittering about.”
“So the spiders and stuff are…?”
“Mechanical shells operated by whichever spirit or elemental chooses to slip in. They have a set of parameters scribed inside, and everything in my house is marked with its proper place and function, so they can't do too much damage—they'll be gently repulsed before they can knock over a vase, for example.”
“I wish I'd known that trick when I was childproofing my house,” said Enkhaelen wryly. “But this would be a good place for you to study, Cob, in the future. You have a strong spirit-connection that you should learn to exercise.”
“I know, I know,” Cob mumbled.
“Like with your arm.”
“I know!”
Enkhaelen smirked, clearly amused by his annoyance. “It's not just the elements that you can influence, or the little spirits. You've seen me force Arik to change; you can do that too, with practice. I may not be able to spin you a new arm any time soon, but you needn't despair of the loss. You can still use it, just in its own way.”
Cob opened his mouth, then realized something. All this time, Enkhaelen had been speaking as if he was still going on the trek. But he couldn't—not like this. The mending that both the cursethorn and Enkhaelen had done for him had ensured he wouldn't die—had in fact nearly wiped out the ill effects of the amputation—but they could do nothing to replace his arm.
Well, the cursethorn could try, but he wasn't happy about it.
“I can learn,” he said slowly, “but that takes time too. And we don't have time. You need t'find someone else to help you. Maybe this Senivaten—“
“The Senivaten would lock me up as soon as they figured out how,” said Enkhaelen dryly, “and unlike Imperial efforts, they might even succeed. I have collaborated with them, but they are not my friends. Right now, Cob, you are what I have, so I will continue to make use of you.”
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 57