by Alex Raizman
That was the underlying message that drove Haradeth more and more to watch the historical documentaries and fictional light-plays. Across the globe, resistance to the Alohym was dying out. Several places the Sylvani watched showed no more evidence of rebellion, or what little remained was scattered and weak.
Humanity was losing, the Underfolk had hidden beneath the earth, and the Sylvani were withdrawing to this hidden city.
To make matters worth, Lorathor was becoming increasingly sullen. Haradeth sought him out, tried to get him to watch the light plays, but was constantly rebuffed. Offers to let Lorathor speak about what bothered him were met with glib remarks that held a bitter edge that Lorathor had never displayed before. After the seventh day, Haradeth stopped trying. Lorathor was struggling with whatever was eating as he soul but would accept no aid.
There were still the light-plays to distract him.
It was with half-relief, half-reluctance that Haradeth responded to the Tarnished One’s summons. He’d been in the middle of a recreation of the Kalcoan League’s war with the Cardomethi Empire, and he strongly suspected that Dornna and Ulmarit were about to confess their eternal love to each other. However, a chance to get away from the siren call of the light-plays seemed like a blessing, and Haradeth dearly hoped that Lorathor would be roused from his torpor if they had something to do.
The summons arrived in the form of a tiny lattice mind, no bigger than a shrew, that arrived in Haradeth’s room by rolling itself into a sphere. When he’d paused his light play to inspect the strange arrival, it had uncurled itself to reveal what appeared at first like an oversized pill bug. The Tarnished One’s voice emitted from a tiny mouth. “Hello Haradeth! Please come down to my house because I have news and I want to see if you’ll let me poke you in the finger with an especially long needle I have found. If you don’t come, I will wait until you sleep and stab you with it anyway, and it will not be in your finger.”
Lorathor came to Haradeth before he’d finished trying to contemplate where the Tarnished One would stab him if he didn’t show.
“You got the message?” Lorathor asked. Well, Haradeth assumed it was a question. It was the longest sentence Lorathor had grunted at him since their last visit to the Tarnished One, and it had the general timber of a question.
“Just did.” Haradeth stood up and smiled at Lorathor. They Sylvani’s skin was grey and brown, the same color it had been for days now. Haradeth couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Lorathor shift color. Probably the last time he’d seen Lorathor smile. Both had been far too long. “We might be able to move on soon.”
Lorathor grunted and motioned for Haradeth to follow. Haradeth did, hoping – if the Tarnished One didn’t have anything directly for them – she’d at least have something to rouse Lorathor from whatever malaise was afflicting him.
***
As promised, the Tarnished One was waiting for them with a ‘needle,’ if the definition of needle was changed to include an outright stiletto so large it lacked only a handle to function as a rapier. “You came,” she said, sighing in disappointment. “I guess that means you can choose where I stab you.”
“I would prefer if you didn’t,” Haradeth said carefully.
“And I would prefer if I did,” the Tarnished One said with a broad grin, the metal slivers around her glass eyes dilating to make her look more innocent. When Haradeth met her gaze with a level one of his own, she sighed. “You’re absolutely no fun. Fine. I need your blood.” Seeing the expression that crossed Haradeth’s face, she rolled her eyes. “I need a tiny amount of your blood. This needle is sterile and will store it safely.”
“You don’t want to stab Lorathor too?” Haradeth asked, stalling.
Lorathor shot Haradeth a dirty look as the Tarnished One giggled. “Of course I want to stab him, silly. I just don’t need to stab him. I need to stab you. Like a pincushion.” Her eyes widened. “Yes. That is what you shall be. God of Pincushions. Because I’ll stab you, you see?”
“I did pick up on that,” Haradeth said, his voice so dry it was practically desiccated.
“Well, I don’t know what your meat brain picks up on. No one ever lets me open their meat brains while they’re alive so I can see how they work on. I just have to assume you all are dense and need everything spelled out for you.”
“We can’t all be that dense.” Haradeth crossed his arms. As much as he hated to admit it, part of him was enjoying the banter with this clockwork psychopath. She had the empathy of a starved vulture and a sense of humor Haradeth expected from a rabid hyena, but compared to Lorathor’s endless doldrums, it was a massive improvement.
“If you’re not all dense, then why does everyone react the same when I stab them? They’re always ‘what are you doing to me?’ and ‘why are you doing this?’ and ‘won’t you stop?’ and ‘Oh Light, am I going to die?’ when the answers are clear. In order – stabbing you, because I want to, only when it stops being funny, and maybe – I can never be sure what kills meat.”
Haradeth grimaced. “Well, at the risk of being dense, I would like to know why you want to stab me.”
“Because it’s fun?” The Tainted One offered, cocking her head in confusion. “You are dense, I just told you that’s why I do it.”
“Sorry, I phrased that poorly. Why do you need to stab me?”
“Oh! That’s actually not a dense question.” the Tarnished One paused and tapped her chin, a gentle clinking sound signaling her thought. “Maybe. How much do you know about phase-matter transference equations?”
“I don’t even know what those words mean,” Haradeth said, after mouthing the words a few times to try and work them out. He knew the word equations, but it was already an ugly word, and combined with the others it was like finding a mushroom growing on unidentified meat – even if you didn’t know what you were being fed, you could be certain it was something unwholesome.
“Then it’s not a dense question,” the Tarnished One said. “You’re just poorly educated. I need your blood because the phase-matter…” she saw Haradeth’s eyes glaze over and sighed. “The booger I’m working on needs to be configured for your biology. It’s designed for Sylvani and Lattice Minds. You aren’t either, and you’d end up a red paste at the end. Which would be fun, but not for you.”
Haradeth shuddered. “And what does the…phase-matter…”
“The booger,” the Tarnished One said helpfully.
“Fine. What does the booger do?”
“Well, it’s a highly complex configuration that utilizes a network of three lattice minds to tap into your planet’s natural luminiferous…” Again, she trailed off as Haradeth felt his attention waiver. “Okay, I’ll put this in terms your meat can understand.” She grabbed a piece of sheet metal. “So let’s say this is the world. You are on this end of the sheet. You want to get the other end. You have to walk across it, right?”
“Right,” Haradeth said.
“Okay. What if instead you did this?” With no discernable effort, the Tarnished One folded the nail-thick sheet of steel in half. “You can now go to one point to another in a single step, yes?”
Haradeth nodded, trying to fathom the strength this tiny mechanism possessed.
“Well, the booger folds space like that. It lets you take that step. Only it doesn’t damage the world – things pop back right into place. I think I could find a way to damage the world with it, but I wouldn’t do that until I could find a way out. Otherwise I’d end up damaging myself, and we can’t have that.”
“And you need my blood because?”
“Because if the booger isn’t configured right…well, pretend this sheet metal isn’t the world anymore. Pretend it’s you.” She crumbled the metal into a ball, compacting it into a sphere no bigger than a marble. “See, the booger would try to fit you into a Sylvani shape. But you’re not a Sylvani. So it would use a default configuration – which in this case is a sphere.” She dropped the ball on the ground with a deafening thud. “Only
you wouldn’t stay a sphere. You’d be paste. ”
That answered every question Haradeth dared ask at that moment. He was too busy picturing himself crumbled up into a sphere. Shaking, he held out a finger.
The Tarnished One giggled as she stabbed the offered digit.
Haradeth withdrew his finger with a wince. There hadn’t been much blood, but enough to make him glad he’d only chosen the tip of his finger. The momentary flash of pain also helped Haradeth clear his brain from the earlier confusion. “So, one thing I don’t understand – where can you send us?”
“I can’t send you anywhere.” The Tarnished One gave Haradeth a broad smile. “The booger can.”
Haradeth glanced over at Lorathor, who was at least grinning. That made the budding headache Haradeth felt forming at least a bit more bearable. At least it’s somewhat worth it. The Tarnished One, despite clearly understanding what Haradeth meant, was also clearly going to make Haradeth ask the question correctly before she’d answer.
“Then where can the booger send us?” Haradeth asked, maintaining his patience. It was cheering Lorathor up some to watch Haradeth struggle, and Haradeth reminded himself of how inert Lorathor had been the past few days. It’s worth it, Haradeth repeated.
“It can send you anywhere that, in ancient times, the Sylvan placed receiving disks. And those disks are still functioning. I don’t have a working knowledge of where they are – I only know of a couple. Anortia might know, but she probably doesn’t because she’s just a pretentious song with delusions of godhood.”
Lorathor’s grin faded, and Haradeth had to bite back a curse. “Then if we don’t know where they are, how-” Suddenly, realization struck him, and his eyes widened. “Portal stones.”
Both Lorathor and the Tarnished One gave him curious looked.
“Portal stones!” he repeated excitedly. “That’s what the booger connects to. I remember my mother telling me stories about them! They were left behind by an Old Empire, the one that arose in the aftermath of the Ancient Alohym’s departure. In fact, I say we should call this a portal stone too.”
The Tarnished One sighed heavily, a mechanical grating sound. “Fine, if you want to use a boring name. And yes, those are probably what they are. We worked closely with the Old Empire and gave them access to the…portal stones.” Distain dripped off the last two words like a dirty handkerchief, but Haradeth was too excited to care.
“Do you know where they are?” Lorathor asked Haradeth, and from the sparkle in his eyes, some of Haradeth’s energy was infecting the Sylvani as well.
“There’s one in my mother’s forest. If she’s awoken yet, there might be more she knows of. And even if there aren’t, we know someone who can help us find them. Someone who has been drilled in history since she was in the cradle.”
“Tythel,” Lorathor said.
“Tythel,” Haradeth said, nodding in agreement.
“Tythel!” The Tarnished One said happily. They both looked at her, and she shrugged. “You were both shouting that word, so thought I’d join in. What’s a Tythel?”
“She’s the heir to the throne, a half dragon, and most importantly, she’s a historian.” Haradeth laughed.
“I’ll admit I’m surprised to hear you excited about anything involving her,” Lorathor said, scratching his chin in thought.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” The Tarnished One was tapping her foot in impatience.
“Because she wants to use us to follow her own personal vendetta,” Haradeth said. There wasn’t the usual edge to the words, at least not this time. “The good news is, this gets both us and her what we-”
The Tarnished One whipped the thin stiletto up to Haradeth’s throat with impossible speed. He cut the sentence off and clamped his jaw shut. “Bored now! No more talking about people I don’t know, or I see how many knots I can tie in your entrails before you die.”
Haradeth nodded frantically, and the Tarnished One withdrew the blade. “Good. Now then. I need time to make the ‘portal stones’ not turn pincushion into mush. It’s a stupid name, by the way.”
“Thank you, Tarnished One,” Haradeth said, and then decided to take a risk despite the blade that had just been at his throat. “Is there something else we can call you besides ‘Tarnished One’? It really is more of a title than a name.”
The Tarnished One frowned, and for a moment Haradeth thought he’d made an error and was about to find himself gutted. Just as he was about to flee for his life, the Tarnished One nodded. “No one ever asked me that. I think I’ll allow it, it would be nice have a name. Call me Bix. It’s kind of like the sound a knife makes when it goes into meat, a bit punchy, a bit squishy. Don’t you think it’s a good name?”
Haradeth nodded.
“Good. Now before I work on this-” she pointed the blade at Lorathor. “You seem mopey. I don’t like mopey, it’s boring. People who mope too much end up just kind of sighing in resignation when I threaten to kill them, and that’s no fun.”
Lorathor pursed his lips into thin lines. “Well, Bix, excuse me for being mopey. I’m kind of dealing with the sudden knowledge that my entire life up until now has been a lie.”
“Oh, psh.” The Tarnished One – Bix, Haradeth reminded himself – rolled her eyes. “That’s stupid, even for meat. So, you found out you’re not from this world and the being you worshipped as a goddess is a pretentious bard. You know how awesome that is?”
“I don’t see anything awesome about it,” Lorathor said.
“Because it means you can do whatever you want. This isn’t your world, and your goddess can’t do anything. You can sin if you want, you cannot if you want, you can live or die as you please. You can let me stab you over and over if you want, which I think it’s a great idea personally. You have total freedom because you know it doesn’t matter.”
Lorathor opened his mouth angrily to object, then stopped and considered her words. “I’ll think on that.”
Bix grinned widely. “Good. I’m full of good ideas. Especially the part about letting me stab you over and over. That’s the best idea ever. Now go away. I have to work.”
Haradeth glanced at Lorathor, who nodded.
The entire walk back, Lorathor didn’t seem to show more cheer than he had been, but at least seemed to be puzzling over Bix’s words.
Haradeth decided that, for now, that would be enough.
Chapter 27
“There’s six of them in the main room,” Eupheme said, stepping out of the shadow behind the dresser for what Tythel hoped would be the last time. “And three on both exits. Armed with unlight weapons.”
Tythel swore, although she managed to avoid jumping this time. It helped to expect Eupheme’s return. It helped even more to be busy helping Tellias strap himself into the arcplate. Armin had outdone himself with the device, and even Tythel could follow the relatively simple labelling to install the new power source – one that was designed for skitters, no less. Whenever I see him next, I must tell him he made it as foolproof as possible.
Of course, finding him was contingent on surviving the next five minutes.
“Unlight weapons – see any arcwands?” Tythel asked.
Eupheme nodded. “At least three different people with arcwands, and two with ringwands.”
Tythel grimaced. If they all had melee weapons, it would have been possible to charge through, or utilize their own newly acquired arcwands to keep them at bay. None of them could stand direct unlight beams, although Tellias’ arcplate would be able to absorb a few blasts. She strapped on Tellias’ greaves, making sure the sturdy hide was well secured.