Numenera--The Poison Eater

by Shanna Germain

  Her knees twisted, went numb. Everything swam. She staggered, but she would not, did not, fall. But she retched, remembering something she couldn’t place, her hand over her mouth.

  Nearly everyone in the room was looking at them. Some blatantly. Others sideways. Only Ganeth and Seild seemed captivated by their work.

  “Ah,” Isera said, and covered the hollow with her fist. “I forgot… I must look… It’s only temporary. Ganeth is…” She fell silent, twisted her lips. Her loss for words shook Talia almost as much as her missing eye.

  In truth, Talia couldn’t have cared how it looked, other than the fear and guilt it brought with it. She shook the dream off with a fierceness that was hard won and stepped close to Isera. Not a worm, she thought as she neared her. More like a living root.

  Isera was watching her, her expression all question: what choice do you make now, Poison Eater, with my face ravaged and my vision halved?

  “I…” Talia started, and then her throat closed, tight and choking, before she could finish.

  Her cheeks burned from guilt. And shame at her reaction. She would not have Isera think that the loss of an eye mattered to her. That she was a hypocrite.

  She tried again. “No,” she said. “Not that. I don’t care about that.” She put her hand toward the side of Isera’s face, slow, waited to see her nod before her palm landed and pressed. “What happened? I’m so sorry.”

  “There were creatures,” Isera said. “Not the charn. Something else.” She didn’t sense blame in Isera’s voice, but she felt it anyway. She always did. Always would.

  “I saw them,” Talia said. “I saw them in Ganeth’s device. I saw you get hurt. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s really nothing,” Isera said. And she seemed to believe it, which made the tightness in Talia’s spine loosen just a little. “It happens from time to time. Ganeth’s going to grow me a new one. Or rather, I’m going to grow myself a new one.”

  “Almost ready,” Ganeth said. A small ticking followed his voice, and then he said, “Seild, grab that.”

  Seild suddenly seemed to realize Talia was there. “Tal, we’re making an eye egg!”

  Isera touched the back of Talia’s hand. “Ganeth needs to put me in incubation for a short while. Just until it grows back.”

  Something must have shown in Talia’s face, because Isera reached out and touched the corner of her mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before,” she said. “But if you ever wanted to lie to me about anything…” She pointed to the missing eye. “…now is the time.”

  It took Talia a moment to realize she was teasing, but still the words dug with sharp little barbs. Tooth and claw.

  “We’re ready,” Ganeth said.

  “Hurry, hurry,” Seild said. “It’s dripping.”

  Isera leaned in and touched Talia’s forehead with her own. “See you soon, Poison Eater,” she said. “Keep an eye on the wild one.” Talia didn’t know if she meant Khee or Seild. Both, perhaps.

  The rest of the greyes and zaffre and strangers said, nearly in unison, “Moon meld you, Greyes Isera.” Talia echoed it, half a word late, but wanted desperately to believe that her words would matter.

  She watched as Isera and Ganeth headed toward the back of the house, Ganeth cradling a tiny grey orb in his cupped hands.

  So many things they hadn’t told each other.

  The curtain closed behind them. The room went quiet in the slow, falling way of emptying spaces. Seild came up to her and took her true hand inside her tiny one. Talia looked at her and for the first time, she could see Burrin in her. And the orness too.

  But it was Isera’s mismatched eyes that were staring back at her, asking all of the questions she had no answers for.

  * * *

  “Come, let me have a look at you,” Rakdel said, when the room had mostly cleared. The zaffre and the others had left. Seild and Khee had walked quietly, somberly, into the yard, as if they were not child and beast, but two adults with important things to discuss. It hurt her heart, to watch them go.

  Khee hadn’t said a word to her since he’d left her on the wall. She wanted to call after them. But Khee would talk when he was ready. She could do nothing but wait.

  Talia tried to wave Rakdel away, to distract her by asking, “Are you all right? You looked bad in the market yesterday?” But the chiurgeon just laughed and aimed her toward a chair.

  “Have you forgotten who I am? Sit. Sit and I won’t even ask you who punched you.” She looked at the side of Talia’s neck. “…who punched you with a big stick that seems an awful lot like a big stick I’m familiar with.”

  Talia said nothing. Burrin’s pain was a private thing. He’d only brought it to her because he’d had nowhere else to go.

  Rakdel touched here, there. Pulled things out of her box and used them to look at or feel at the parts of Talia’s body that hurt and then put them back in. True to her word, she did not ask Talia how she’d come by her wounds.

  Finally, she sat back on her heels.

  “Do you want the whole list or just the ones I think you should do something about?”

  “That,” Talia said. Her breath had gotten shorter and tighter as she sat there, and now she hitched up her spine, trying to make more room in her lungs. It didn’t help that she kept looking toward the back of the house, as if she expected Isera to come back any second. Every time she swung her head around, her spine shifted in a broken, uneven way. “That second one.”

  “I think you might have cracked a rib, you’ve gotten yourself a good jab to the head, and you’ve got some kind of injury in your back that I can’t figure out. Not a broken bone, but a broken… something.” She leaned in, feeling along Talia’s back as she spoke, down the carved pattern on either side of her spine. Talia had forgotten, as Rakdel was touching her, about the scar until this very moment. She resisted the urge to push the chiurgeon’s hands away in… shame? Fear? She wasn’t sure.

  “Right. There,” Rakdel was saying. “Can you feel it?”

  No. But then yes. Out of all the pain she felt back there, a new one bloomed at the touch, sharp and bladed. It took what little remained of her breath.

  Ganeth came out from the back room, wiping down a small square object with a cloth. “She’s in,” he said, as he settled it into place on the workbench and started folding it up. “Four days, probably, for it to root fully. I’ll come back tomorrow and check.”

  “Ganeth, will you…” Rakdel motioned him over. “What do you make of her back?” Before Talia could even open her mouth to protest, Rakdel said, “Healer’s curiosity. Humor me.”

  She did, despite her instinct not to. Ganeth’s fingers were softer than Rakdel’s, the skin, not the touch. He made tiny, sure movements across her back. Precise movements of hands used to working with things much smaller, more delicate, than the human spine.

  Something passed between Ganeth and Rakdel. A look that was beyond her.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Rakdel said. “Did you know you have some kind of metal in your back? Embedded or–”

  “Implanted, I think,” Ganeth said. “Interwoven in your spine.”

  No. No. No. Her mouth went bitter and dry, all at once. She’d cut off her hand. Her scalp. Khee’s horns. All of it gone. Only for this. Her stomach, which had not fully recovered from Burrin, from Isera, roiled and threatened to turn over yet again.

  No. She would not, could not admit that all of her planning, her loss, the pain she’d taken and given, was for so little. Mostly, she felt stupid. Of course the vordcha did not make a brand upon their martyrs just to brand them. Of course her spine was laced with their tech. How could she have been so stupid? So blind?

  The vordcha would use it to track her. Certainly, they already were. They would come for her. For all of them. And the weapon she’d thought she had – the orness, the device – it was all a lie.

  “The mech is broken,” Ganeth said. “In two places. That might not be a new break though. It’s hard to tell
. I’m not sure what it does, but we could try to fix it.”

  “Or take it out,” Rakdel said. “Are you in much pain?”

  Talia thought about her response very carefully before she made it.

  How are you surviving the poisons? the orness had asked her.

  She hadn’t answered, but she’d known. Or thought she’d known. But, oh, the truth was slippery and oily and much, much worse. Maybe it wasn’t some residual effect of the mech that was saving her from death. Maybe it was the mech still buried beneath her skin. If so, that meant the very thing that was saving her was also drawing the vordcha to her, to all of them.

  Now it was broken.

  “No, no pain,” she lied. “I feel fine. But do you think you could look at this?” She pulled off her hexed armband and passed it over to Ganeth. “I think I punched the wrong thing with it.”

  * * *

  The days that followed took on a short-breath routine. First, check in on Isera and Seild.

  Isera was fully encased in a cocoon of soft, pellucid synth. Ganeth called it a symbiotic sheath. At first glance, she appeared as if she were sleeping, her one visible eye moving behind her lid in rapid, strained movements and her lips clasped tight. The other eye, the one that Seild had called the eye egg, was covered with a mass of yellow goo that undulated, as if it was alive. Maybe it was.

  It never got easy to see her like that. Not even the fact that everyone else seemed to treat this as normal, as common as taking taf or eating dinner, helped her overcome the quick beat of her heart as she looked down at her, wrapped and unconscious on the bed.

  Seild was spending time – too much time, likely – sitting in her mother’s room. Sometimes she “read,” other times she slept. Sometimes, the scariest times, she sat there, picking at the design in the bedspread, pulling the same thread again and again. Talia tried to get her to come with her to Books & Blades or the Eternal Market or anywhere she wanted to go, but the girl refused in a way that was so adult, so undercarried with all of her fear and loss, that Talia couldn’t bear to force her.

  Often Khee stayed with Seild too. He hadn’t talked to Talia since the day of the fight, and he seemed to be spending more and more time with the girl. Talia told herself that she wasn’t jealous; she just missed him. She allowed herself to feel that hurt, the confusion and unfinish of it. She thought that if he could just tell her why he was silent, she would handle it better. But of course, to do that, he would have to speak to her.

  To keep her mind off Khee, Isera, Seild, she spent her time trying to solve the problem of being the poison eater. She kept running it over and over in her mind, tugging at it the way Seild was tugging at her mother’s bedspread: if she stopped being the poison eater, the orness would take Seild as the next one. But if it was the vordcha’s mech keeping her alive, would it do so while it was broken? And would fixing it call the vordcha down upon them?

  She went back to the base of the skar twice, trying to find her way back in, to talk to the orness, but the door wouldn’t open for her again. And the orness never came for her, even though she walked the top of the walls at night, looking for the glow of a moonfruit or the shadow that was darker than shadows ought to be.

  She walked by Ganeth’s shop at least once a day, but never went in. The orness’ words, true or not, had planted a seed of doubt in her mind about him. She never was good at trust, and she knew the orness’ words overlapped with her early reaction to him – so like the vordcha – in a way that wasn’t useful, but even that was not enough to convince her to step inside, to call out his name, to ask him for help.

  * * *

  Most days, she spent her time at Books & Blades, where she paged through what felt like endless piles of books looking for answers that she didn’t find. In addition to the obvious – how do I survive this? How does everyone survive this? – she was looking for answers about what was real, what was not. Who was the orness? What was the truth of the poison eater? Of the aria?

  Each day, she told herself that it would be the day she would find something useful in the books. A clear and perfect explanation of what was true and what was false. And each day, she left the store, having gained a little more knowledge, but not enough. Never enough.

  The moon was already shifting, moving into its next phase. It wouldn’t be long before it was time for another poisoning. She’d hoped to have a better understanding of it, to have a plan for surviving it before that happened. But time was slipping away, and her ideas were dwindling faster than her understanding was growing.

  * * *

  It was three days before the next poisoning when she again headed to Omuf-Rhi’s shop. Khee was with her, silent but close enough that she could feel his heat against her leg.

  When they arrived, Omuf-Rhi was reading, so engrossed in his book that he didn’t hear her enter the shop. She found that in the silence, she missed his echoing hello. Rather than bother him, she buried herself in the store’s dusty stacks.

  She watched him read, his head down, flipping through the pages far faster than she could. It would have taken her half a day, more, to make it through the pages he’d completed just while she stood there watching.

  He was an enigma to her in many ways, flowing between a self that could spend hours training with a weapon, and then the next day, be so engrossed in learning from words that he didn’t even hear someone talking to him. Most she had known had one thing, and one thing only, to their passion.

  You don’t have to do everything alone, Talia. You ran once. But that doesn’t mean you will always run. Trust yourself to trust others.

  It was so hard.

  “Omuf-Rhi,” she said, as she stepped up closer to him. Where the glow lights hit his body, his hair was tawny, almost golden. “Are you from here? From Enthait?”

  “No,” he murmured, not stopping in his reading.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked.

  He lifted his head and she wondered yet again what set of eyes he saw her with, or if it was all of them.

  “A place called Seshar, far, far to the west.”

  “Do they have an orness there? A poison eater?”

  “No,” he said. “Although they have other stories, other myths.”

  Stories and myths, he said. Not histories. Not futures. Stories and myths. As in things that were not always true.

  She considered for a moment, trying to figure out what she wanted to ask. Khee sat on his haunches next to her. He’d started coming inside in the last week or so, even if Omuf-Rhi was there.

  “Did you bring all of these with you? From the… Seshar.” The sh in the middle was hard to get her tongue out of the way for.

  “My mother was also a bookseller,” he said. There was nothing else forthcoming, which was unusual. He’d been quiet lately, and she wondered if there were things on his mind or if there was another reason.

  She picked up a book near her hand. The Wonders of Our World: The Steadfast and Beyond. Naind Oreni. Another, smaller. Verses of the Hidden Realms. Books and books. She’d never work her way through all of them. Not even with her improved reading skills.

  “Have you read all of these books?”

  “Most,” he said.

  “And do you remember them all?”

  Omuf-Rhi carried a set of very thin silver blades in a pouch on his belt that he tucked into whatever books he was reading; he did so with one now, closing the cover so softly she didn’t hear it.

  “Most.” There was a question in his voice.

  She did her best to answer it, without actually doing so. The orness had said that she saw the whole city. Whether or not that was true, she didn’t know. What she did know was that everything she asked out loud about her, about the poisoning, it felt like a risk. The question was: was that a risk worth taking? After a moment’s uncertainty, she decided that it was.

  She moved in closer, leaned her elbows on the counter.

  “What do all of these books say of the orness? How old she is? When she
came to power?”

  He shrugged. “They don’t.”

  She waited, to see if there was more. It was infuriating, sometimes, how much he talked when she didn’t need him to, and how little he did when she wanted information from him. “Why do you think that is?” she prodded.

  He considered for a long moment. There was a plate of dried fruit and meat at his elbow, and he reached for a handful, then pushed the dish toward her. “I think because the orness is a tale for the telling, not for the reading.”

  “What’s the difference?” She took one of the pieces of meat, tossed it to Khee. He snapped it out of the air and then grinned, both of his tongues lolling to the side. Sometimes, she supposed, you didn’t need language to communicate with each other.

  “One is immutable and so you write it down,” Omuf-Rhi said. “Because it can stay the same forever. The other needs to be malleable, to have the option to change with the world, and the world’s needs.”

  “Or the city and the city’s needs,” she said.

  He stopped chewing for a moment. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Do you believe?”

  “In you?” There was a layer of tease in his words that brought back the image of him on the night they’d met, his arm wrapped and bleeding. You couldn’t even see the teeth marks any longer.

  “In me,” she said. “In the orness, in some unknown danger called the charn, in her weapon. The whole thing.” She felt herself walking on a thin, unsteady path, dangerous on all sides. Careful, child.

  “I believe that the city needs to believe.” He spread his hands. “Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  “No one ever asks,” she said. “Whether it’s worth it? All these deaths? Trying to find the true poison eater? The orness?”

  “If they believe it is the way it must be, who would question it?”

  “So…” She was doing her best to think through everything that was moving around in her brain. “So if the poison eater was a lie…” Too late she realized her mistake, having spoken it aloud, but there was nowhere else to go. “If,” she emphasized. “Would that mean the orness was also? And the aria? And would it matter, if the city believed in it?”