Her breath caught, and she had to put her hand on the table to steady herself.
“If you must step away from the acid and the flames for a while, so be it,” he said. He poured her a fifth shot. “Drink liquor, let your mind wander, fall asleep without worrying your dreams will turn real. Possibly, you only see what will be, regardless. It’s useful for spying, for anticipating enemy action, but it isn’t vital for my plans. If you can influence the future you see, well, I can wait until this war is over to have a full range of scrying powers at my disposal.”
She did not drink the fifth shot. Instead she wrapped her hand around the glass and met his eyes, those black voids in his angelic face.
“I thought you weren’t going to send me back to scrubbing stairs,” she said. “Is this just some last night with... liquor and talking?”
He smiled again, his white teeth dazzling. “I am not known for such mercies,” he said.
He came close, his scent as golden and strange as his face. He was a freak of beauty, deadlier than scrying and more seductive.
“There are things you can do for me, besides scrying,” he whispered, and his breath—false breath, for what neininki needed to breathe?—brushed warm against her skin. There was no hint of liquor on it. It had all burned away in the void where his soul should be.
Her mind veered away in disbelief as he kissed her. His gold lips seared her like fire shooting to her core.
He pulled back and looked at her. His eyes were all black, the whites vanished. His smile was devilish.
“You doubt me, Isri, but I never lie. And you are beautiful.”
He took her face in both hands—she felt his touch burn through scars and skin—and pulled her in for another kiss, deeper, hotter.
When he released her, she touched her scars herself. Then she touched his flawless face, and pulled him close for a kiss of her own.
“Now,” he said, breaking the kiss to let her breathe, “take off your robes.”
* * *
She woke in the night, hearing Ayne say, “He will use you and kill you.”
The bed was warm—not her bed. Lun’s bed, the nicest bed in the house. Karnon Dae lay stretched out beside her, awake. Neininki did not sleep.
He rolled toward her in the dark. She could feel his eyes on her. He was waiting for her to speak.
“They—the other scryers—have been trying to trick me into scrying out my own death,” she said.
The heat of him was reassuring and disconcerting, both at once. He wrapped himself around her, spooning her body in his own, and leaned in close. In a voice so quiet she could barely hear it, even with his lips against her ear, he whispered, “They’re watching us now.”
For an instant, only an instant, she stiffened. Then, as his hands moved over her body, she realized what he wanted. What he wanted his enemies to see.
She wanted them to see it, too. She wanted Lun to see it. And, with a stab of triumph, she realized that Othek had been on the verge of telling him when Othek’s scryers had ripped the vision away.
Let this be what terrified them. She would enjoy it—in more senses than one. Karnon Dae was an amazing lover. He was far better than even her husband had been, and Lun’s skill had been famous among the concubines and courtesans. But then, Lun was thirty-five. Dae, as a neininki, could easily be ten times as old. Older. He’d had ten times as many women, and not just aristo courtesans, to teach him their secrets.
And he wanted Esthe.
He turned the lights up, made them blaze. Over the course of their lovemaking, he ripped the bedsheets off the bed and knocked the maps off Lun’s old desk. He put her on glorious display, every side of her, every part, and never had she felt so beautiful. She screamed and gasped her way through seven or eight orgasms before they collapsed, her panting for breath, on the bed.
She shivered a bit from the sweat cooling on her body and post-orgasmic weakness. Laughing, he wrapped her in one of his own robes.
“They’ve stopped watching,” he said, an enormous grin humanizing his face. “The young male watched the longest. Unsurprisingly.”
“The anubis,” Esthe said, making an expression of distaste. “I don’t know his name.”
Then she gave in and laughed, too.
“It must take them a while to get the courage to tell,” she said. “Because they were in the past when they saw that, and... well, as of the last time I scryed, someone was only just getting around to telling the prince and my husband, and that was still to come. Don’t know how far in the future it was—we can’t judge time gaps precisely.”
“They were about a day and a half behind us,” Dae said. “But I don’t know how long until your vision will come true. I know nothing of the future.”
She felt some of her joy slip away, her enemies’ warnings sneaking in.
“You know how I will die,” she said. “Because it is up to you.”
He ran his hand along her skin, scarred and smooth. “I don’t know how you will die, not yet,” he said, his voice quiet. “You could change your mind. You could betray me. You don’t want to, but you still love Lun.”
She opened her mouth to deny it. Then wisely she silenced herself. Neininki did not tolerate lies.
* * *
Esthe risked scrying again. She knew her former teacher would say she should not, not with the three hunting for her, not when she was in the grips of a run of fortune she could not understand.
Karnon Nameless Dae—or Neininki Karnon Dae, as she privately thought of him, calling him Karnon in the depths of the night—made love to her once or twice a day. The servants and drudges treated her not with fear and well-hidden reluctance, as they once had, but with genuine deference.
She was reclusive no longer. She did not lurk within her lab. She did not hide her face behind hoods. Dae adorned her with rare gems, draped them over her face and body until she forgot that face or body had ever looked different than they did today. Scars meant nothing to him. He told her that he wanted her, and he never lied.
He did not love her and did not pretend to. It made her feel safe—she had nothing to lose, no seemingly substantial feeling that would dissolve to nothing tomorrow.
She did not have to scry. Not a mere concubine, she had a voice among Dae’s advisors, a use for her unmystical aristo education. Dae was satisfied. But her sorcerous skills would atrophy if she stopped using them. And, feeling his mouth move up and down both sides of her body indiscriminately, the only significant fear her life had held—the fear of the coming acid—seemed irrational to her. Watching Dae and herself having sex in the mirror of Lun’s old wardrobe room, she swore off all forms of fear. She decided to scry again.
Risk meant nothing when she was dead anyway.
The three had watched for such a moment. They had prepared well. Instead of the vision she sought—a vision of the next time Ibren felt himself to be alone—another vision enveloped her.
There was her mother’s dressing room, the chairs burned by lasers, a miasma of perfume and blood thick in the air. There was a faceless body—her father’s, by its rings—clutching a gun its slack hand. Next was her brother and his bride, older than when she had seen them last, kneeling in chains.
Next was Othek, his bearded face defiant. He knelt chained before Dae, both of them on a podium before a mob. Esthe could not make out the screams and cries of the masses, but she knew they wanted blood.
It was an old practice, meting out public and bloody deaths for non-aristo offenders. In darker ages, the aristos had personally slit the throats of drudges who had killed aristos, demanding life for life. They had allowed the blood to fly out over the witnesses. Once more enlightened eras arose, they eliminated the practice in favor of more hygienic killings.
Public throat-slitting was exactly the kind of practice that would strike her godlike lover as fitting to resurrect. This time for execution of aristos.
Esthe did not want to see this. She liked Othek. She knew he liked her. Even learning
she had betrayed the aristos, he had blamed Lun. He wanted her dead, yes, but that was because he respected her abilities.
He warranted better than to be killed for the gratification of a mass of drudges.
She struggled to break away from the vision and could not. The three would make her watch this. They would force her to push the vision one way or the other. If she helped Othek, she would betray Karnon Dae. If she did not, she would betray her family, the only people who had ever loved her, the only people—besides Lun—whom she had ever loved.
“When every living member of your family is dead,” Vier whispered, and Dae’s men forced Othek’s head back. At least, she noticed, his scalp was shaved. They had not made him grow his hair out in prison. But if they had, she realized, the mob would not know to mark him as aristo.
The knife came up.
“Your scryers are watching,” Karnon Dae said to Othek with a bloody, bright smile. “Did they warn you?”
She felt the three scryers flinch, shocked.
The knife came down, the sun glinting off the blade in a flash of light. Hot blood splashed out over the crowd.
In that instant—while the other three reeled, horrified to find that in watching Karnon Dae, he was watching them back—Esthe took control of the vision.
She targeted Vier, the consumptive, who she could sense was the brainchild behind the plan to show her loved ones’ destruction.
Scrying showed more than the eyes saw. Vier’s lungs were hidden from light, but Esthe could see them even in darkness. The tuberculosis had eaten pockets into his lung tissue, soupy tumors that his body had walled off. His breath hissed in and out of the fraction of his lungs that was still viable.
It began to hiss in and out faster, as future-Vier began to hyperventilate.
Esthe felt a sick and fascinated excitement as the vision gave her an understanding of anatomy such as only medics and anubises had. Part of scrying, an addictive part, was knowing the meaning behind things she watched.
There, right beside the toxic tubercular pocket in his left-hand lung, was a huge pulmonary artery, pulsing with blood straight from the heart. As future-Vier panicked, the pressure in the pulmonary artery grew. And there—quite suddenly—the pocket broke through the artery wall.
Blood flooded everything, forcing its way through the thin barrier that separated sick and healthy tissue, filling Vier’s lungs with fluid. Each beat of his heart sent more blood spurting into his alveoli, drowning him. He gasped and choked and spluttered, until at last his heart stopped pumping blood into his lungs, because his heart... stopped pumping altogether.
Vier, whom she had forced to watch with her, now began to hyperventilate.
The vision broke.
Esthe rose from her laboratory seat. Stiffened muscles screamed and joints popped as she shook herself loose of the clinging remnants of the vision. She emptied the beaker of acid carefully into the proper receptacle.
She needed to tell Dae one of the enemy scryers was dead.
* * *
“A consumptive is an easy kill,” she said. “The anubis will be the hardest, because he is numb to the fear of death.”
“Focus your efforts on Ayne,” Karnon Dae said. “Hold off on the anubis.”
She did as he said and did not ask why. But she wondered.
She wondered until the day she saw a vision of Ayne in the flickering light of a flame shining through a beaker of acid. She saw Ayne’s face flush purple and her eyes bulge as the anubis pulled a garrote tight.
No longer was Esthe Karnon Dae’s only scryer. He had recruited the anubis—or would soon.
She went to find Dae in his command center. He stood by a map he’d had built, a three-dimensional glass cube with subways and airways and tunnels, hills and lakes and domes all present. He could slide colored lights through the glass to symbolize the movement of soldiers, trains, carriers, and tanks.
She knew he could sense her distress. He did not need to be a neininki to do it—tension radiated from her spine to her fingers, curled into fists. His eyes stayed on his map, however.
“An anubis should not be scrying”, she said.
“I’m destroying your caste system.” His voice was cool. “Hadn’t you noticed?”
She forced her hands open, forced them into a more relaxed shape. Her voice did not—could not—follow suit. “Do you want the future to be steeped in death? Because that is how an anubis will scry it.”
He looked at her, and his black eyes were flat and unamused.
“Your prejudices strain my patience,” he said. He turned back to his map. He made a minute adjustment in the position of a light. “You may go.”
She left. Left before she could fling out foolish accusations. Left before she could smash his map on the floor and scream like an airsailor.
* * *
A courier brought Esthe the news that Dae’s troops had captured Lun.
Esthe was in her lab. The overhead lights were dark. All around her bowls of fire burned. She had turned off the gas jets and surrounded herself with containers of different fuels, each one burning in its own particular color, most in shades of yellow and gold and red but one violet and one, under a venting hood, a noxious green.
Facing the courier, Esthe took one last glimpse through the glass bubble of acid she held in her hand. Then she placed it with careful precision into its stand.
She had not been able to find Ibren in her visions. Having seen Ayne’s death, Esthe could not scry her a sooner one, and meanwhile Ayne had discovered and revealed Esthe’s self-imposed limitation concerning her family members. Ibren now stayed close to Esthe’s family on purpose. His marriage to Lisle, her cousin once-removed, had been performed. They sheltered with still more of Esthe’s family—Esthe hoped not her brother. She had not scryed his destruction, and she held onto hope that he would live.
Vier’s words, that she would not die until all the living members of her family were dead, haunted her.
The courier said that Dae was with the prisoner.
Esthe kept her face immobile—a task the scars made easier—and asked the courier one question.
Dae did not have Ibren, the courier told her. Only Lun.
She wondered if Vier had included Lun as a member of her family when he said they would all die before she did. She had not included Lun in her prohibition to Dae.
Why was it she could see Othek and her parents dead but not her husband?
Karnon Dae’s mandatory truthfulness bound him to kill Lun, as it bound him to kill her. But Karnon Dae could fit a great deal of leniency into a death sentence, as she had every reason to know.
If Esthe betrayed him, he would give her a terrible death. But he might give her a terrible death even if she stayed loyal.
Lun would never betray Ibren. But if he would—just if—what deal might Karnon Dae be willing to strike with him?
She had made Lun a cuckold before the eyes of the world, a laughingstock to the very allies for whom he had sacrificed so much. Karnon Dae could offer him revenge.
Esthe dismissed the courier. Then she took out the keys to her house—copies of them, at any rate—and rose from her chair. She put out the fires and turned on the lights.
She retrieved two specific vials.
One was acid, the same kind of acid that had burned her. That acid worked best for her scrying.
The other was Lun’s parting gift.
She put the vials into the pockets of her red dress. The dress was new, cut wide at the neckline to show her collarbone.
She locked her lab behind her and strode down into the metal bowels of her house.
The clytemn wing in the lowest basements held the secure rooms, rooms where treasures and prisoners were kept. She strode the dark halls without fear, heeding neither cries nor echoes. She knew where Lun would be—the deepest cell.
In front of the door, she encountered one of Dae’s soldiers. He stood immobile, his armor twinkling with lights, his body bristling with wea
pons, his faceplate a shatterproof screen. He barred her path.
She demanded passage.
The soldier spoke into the comm in his helmet, listened to the earpiece reply, and stepped to the side.
Her keys opened the door. She entered without hesitation, letting the door shut behind her.
Dae’s golden presence dominated the space. In the odd reversal common to him, his unshorn hair and simple black clothes marked him as a prisoner, but he alone was free.
There on a bench before Dae sat Lun. Stubble showed on his head, and lines cut deep around his eyes. He needed a shower, but his clothes were rich and fine.
He was unshackled.
In chains beside him sat her brother. The sight of him cut Esthe somewhere deep, where it did not show.
For a moment the three of them stared at her, saying nothing. She was an interloper in their tete-a-tete.
“I thought he’d fixed your face,” Lun said. He was not taunting her—his voice held mild surprise.
In the pockets of her gown, Esthe had the vial of acid. Her fingers flexed with the impulse to throw it on Lun.
And then Dae was there beside her. His black will was a palpable thing.
“What is it you have in your pocket?” he asked.
Her fingers closed on a vial. By its etchings, she knew it to be the poison, not the acid. It would do no good flung in Lun’s face.
She took out the poison.
“I thought to return his parting gift to me,” she said. “Too soon, perhaps?”
Dae smiled, amused. He took the vial from her hands.
“Too soon,” he said.
She hoped suddenly—hope like a sharp pain—that she would not need that poison herself. Why was her brother chained but Lun free?
Lun stood and walked to stand beside Dae. He smiled at her. His schooled expression of contempt was undercut by a glint of vicious triumph.
“He has offered me the same deal that you have, Esthe,” Lun said.
Lun had always looked so handsome to her. Beside Dae’s gilded perfection, however, his gloating face was a welter of physical flaws, twisted and ugly.
But Dae’s face was an illusion, a corporeal mask over a being that was not limited by corporeality. Not a moral creature, Dae said. Not known for his mercies.
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