Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2)

by Toby Andersen

  They had been running low on supplies in the last few days, and Totelun was keeping an eye open for prey. Cassandra was not making it easy. Each night she insisted on a vegetarian diet of tubers and seeds, but Totelun craved something more substantial.

  [How am I supposed to hunt if you won’t let me?]

  She wasn’t giving in. [It’s simple. Don’t hunt. Forage.]

  The Islands stayed with them every day from then on, a stark reminder throughout the daylight hours of exactly what was at stake and how close he was to getting home. He could almost taste it, unlike the meat he craved.

  At one point the climb levelled out and there was a stretch of open hiking along the top ledge of a secondary peak before they would re-join the trail. The snow in front of them was pristine and unspoilt, a flat expanse for some fifty feet ahead, with a sheer drop to either side.

  Totelun stopped to look at it, and Cassandra passed him. He wondered why the perfect snow bothered him so much. Then he realised it was his danger sense. There was something wrong here.

  ‘Cassandra,’ he called, but of course she didn’t hear him. He ran to catch up, grabbed her arm to stop her but not before two creatures had shot out of the snow, tooth-filled maws gaping. One got Cassandra’s staff, the other bit into fur on Totelun’s calf. He stabbed the creature with a quickly drawn dagger. Cassandra reacted quickly, smashing the end of her staff down on her one’s head.

  They both stopped and looked at the dead beasts; they were the size and shape of large eels, an unfriendly mouth at one end, a tubular body and then, where a tail might be on a normal creature, a mass of tiny muscular roots. They were closer to a plant than an animal.

  They reminded Totelun uncomfortably of Trelki and he shuddered.

  [What do we do?] Cassandra wrote.

  [We can’t climb down again. Not from here. We have to go ahead.]

  Totelun looked along the walkway, guessing that the entire area was mined with these snapping carnivorous plants. He could imagine walking along it and losing a foot very easily. If you fell from the first limb injury you would trigger more and more of them to shoot from the snow and latch on. Not a nice way to go. Bitten apart by predatory cucumbers.

  [You’re going to kill more of them?] wrote Cassandra. [Just so we can get past?]

  Totelun had had enough. He took the leaf. [Yes I am, and you’re going to help me.]

  [No, I’m not.]

  [It’s them or us. We can’t go around. It’s not about meat, it’s about survival.]

  Cassandra wasn’t impressed, but he had her on logic, and he had to admit she was often open to being convinced by a good argument. The only thing that she still hadn’t learnt was to eat anything you could, because you never knew when you’d get another chance.

  In the same spirit he took the two dead beasts and tied them to his belt, and then wrote out instructions for Cassandra. [You stand just behind me with your staff out. Gently tap the snow as we move slowly forward. Each time one pops up, I will take care of it.] He would stab the vicious little vegetables through whatever passed for their hearts.

  She nodded, agreeing reluctantly. There was no other way to progress, and time was marching on. The shadow from the Islands was always upon them.

  Cassandra began to sweep the walkway ahead, tapping the staff to the ground every step or two. Tap, tap, tap. Totelun waited each time holding his breath, daggers in hand. Tap, wait, nothing. Tap, wait, nothing.

  After they had advanced a slow five feet, Cassandra looked at him and shrugged. He gestured to keep going.

  Tap, tap.

  With a shower of snow and ice another of the vicious creatures burst up snapping and thrashing at the prey it thought was above. Totelun stabbed it straight out of the air. After that they found one every few feet. One wrong move and you’d either fall to your death or get a hand severed in those ferocious jaws. Totelun kept worrying the staff would miss one and it would burst up at their feet instead. After one or two, Cassandra got the idea; she could see they were dangerous and they had little choice.

  Ten minutes of creeping forward and they made it to the end of the open ledge, finding the way ahead was steep rock climbing again, but at least not a sheer cliff-face.

  Totelun looked back over the tossed and disturbed snow behind them; even if they’d missed one they had got past it. His belt was heavy with the creatures, at least twenty in total, each as long as his arm.

  Cassandra handed him a note. [I hope you’re not planning on eating them.]

  [Why not?]

  [We agreed. No more animals for food.]

  [These are dead already. You want me to waste them?] Totelun reasoned.

  [I don’t care. They wouldn’t be dead if not for us.]

  Totelun wasn’t backing down this time. [They aren’t animals. They have roots. They are vegetables. Just carnivorous ones. You can eat them too.]

  She held up the gaping tooth-filled jaws of one that hung on Totelun’s belt. [They are NOT vegetables!]

  *

  The vegetable creatures tasted rank, closer to the salty mollusc they really were. Totelun forced them down and claimed they were delicious when Cassandra asked after seeing his giveaway expression.

  Cassandra ate her real vegetables in silence, but Totelun was sure he caught the edge of a smile.

  When they had eaten she passed him a note. [Naus is travelling with a Cephean, like me.]

  [You mean you can hear him?] Totelun was interested despite himself. They’d spoken of her visions, but not in detail about what she could hear. It was so strange to think he could shout and rage, and she wouldn’t here a thing, but she could clearly hear what was happening in cities miles away and far below them.

  Cassandra nodded. [Yes, I can hear him,] she wrote.

  The fire crackled, and Totelun pushed a few more twigs into the centre.

  When he didn’t write anything back to her, Cassandra passed him another leaf. He didn’t read it, just wrote back. He could feel himself breathing hard, pointlessly angry just at the thought of the old man. [I don’t care what he’s doing. He left us.]

  Was he just jealous? Naus was out there trying to solve the prophecy, and here he was just running from it. Heading for home, as far away from the Medusi and the responsibilities he had half accepted as he could physically get.

  Cassandra didn’t write anything further. With a sigh he turned over the leaf and read it. [The Cephean is the one from the Duke’s court in Argentor. His name is Crescen.] The names as ever, were unfamiliar, but Totelun was becoming more and more proficient in puzzling them out and even guessing at the spoken version based on his knowledge of other sounds and phrases. [I met him once before, when the Argentori Duke came to the palace to petition for Aurelia’s hand in marriage. He must have been banished by his father once the Order was no longer in the business of helping the Duke.]

  She hadn’t written about Naus anyway. Only this Crescen, the son of the Duke, thralled by the Order of the Medousa. Why was he travelling East with Naus, and not South to his mistress. And why was Naus travelling with a Cephean at all? Didn’t he realise how dangerous that was? The Medousa could hear everything.

  When he looked up, Cassandra had another leaf written. He met her eyes in the firelight and read concern and worry there. He took the note. In the end he was morbidly curious and the information was right there. He couldn’t help himself.

  [Naus is doing something important, so that you can succeed in your quest.] So she didn’t share his appraisal that he was giving up. That was something. [He is posing as a storyteller, something I’m sure he is very capable of. I will listen carefully for if he says anything that Crescen would find cryptic. Maybe it will be a message for us.]

  Totelun wrote back. [Clearly he thinks Crescen can help him get into the Temple. Otherwise Naus would have killed him. Let’s just say he’s not a fan of the Order.]

  When she looked back and frowned, he took the leaf and wrote, [The Thorn is an assassin.] Cassandra seemed to have t
rouble melding both the Thorn, legendary ruthless assassin and defier of death with the kindly, if sarcastic, old nomad she had met in Theris. There’s even more you don’t know about him. Totelun thought of the story Naus had told him of his days serving the first Empress Eleutheria, and the things she had made him do. The things she had done to him.

  When he looked at the blank leaf where he intended to write a response, instead he found himself composing an apology. [I’m sorry for my tactless questions about your visions.]

  Cassandra smiled. [It’s okay. I still don’t want to talk about it though.]

  So it was okay for her to force him to talk about Naus, but not okay for him to demand she talk about her death visions? He decided to let it go; he’d rather be friends.

  Much later, as they huddled together to keep warm and the temperature on the mountainside dropped quickly, he found he had questions instead about Noctiluca. [What is Noctiluca doing now?]

  [Why do you ask?] Cassandra wrote back.

  He indulged her question. [Naus is looking for information that will help us fight Noctiluca. I should too. I'm not going to abandon the prophecy when we reach the Islands. If anything, maybe I can convince them to help.]

  She didn’t really answer his question. [I can hear what the rest of the Cephean hive-mind can hear. I am able to exercise a little control, a little choice. I can choose to hear one stream or another. I can listen to a little of the Duke’s court, houses where they still have one of the Cephean, though there aren’t many. Most talk is innocuous at best, but sometimes I hear a little about Aurelia, or some of the soldier’s news of the war.] It was more of an explanation of her skill’s limitations.

  [And Noctiluca can hear what you hear.] Totelun left the question mark off the end to make it a statement.

  Cassandra nodded rather than write anything back.

  [Can you hear the Medousa herself?] he prompted, again.

  [I can, but I don’t like to listen to her. I listen to the Cephean around her, but not the ones actually in her presence. It’s painful.]

  [Are you afraid of her?]

  She gave him a strange look. [Of course. And don’t try to tell me you aren’t. If I open myself up to the hive-mind completely, then I can hear her. Her voice penetrates everything, the power of it. It reminds me of times I would rather forget. Times when I was in the Temple, being tortured like you were.] Totelun hadn’t thought about it since Theris. The High Cleric had described the process of thralling to him in some detail. He shuddered to think of Cassandra having to go through that, and muttered a vow to himself that Cassandra couldn’t hear. If he had that man in his power again, he would end him.

  Cassandra’s note continued. [Listening to her is like torture. She is always surrounded by children in pain, children like me. She hates and rages, and then loves so strongly. She is so overwhelming, like a force of nature, but unnatural. She loves her children so completely, but it's her love, twisted and controlling and tainted with ownership.]

  Totelun knew she wouldn’t like it, but they needed every piece of information they could get. [I shouldn’t have said I didn’t want to know about Naus. I need you to listen to him, and tell me anything he says. It could be important. But even more than that, you need to listen to her. Anything she says might be the clue we need to defeat her.]

  Cassandra nodded beside him, but she didn’t write back to him again that night.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Aurelia

  The week that followed the Duke’s decision was possibly one of the worst Aurelia had ever borne, and that included when she’d lost Theris. She sighed, exasperated. ‘I just can’t believe how badly she took it.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said Faibryn Argentor, formerly Marcus the manservant. The Duke’s son – did that make him an earl? Aurelia could never quite keep that straight – lounged on a cushion-covered ottoman in a receiving room on the other side of the civic buildings from her own suite. These weren’t his personal rooms – that would have been frowned upon – but they were chambers owned by the Argentor family.

  ‘I mean I knew she would take it badly. But this?’

  ‘Nepheli has been known to destroy people for less.’

  Aurelia sat across from him, separated by a lavish selection of snacks and treats from all across what used to be the Western half of her family’s former empire. There were cured meats from the prized herds on the northern borderlands, exotic fruits from the warmer southern islands that would not have grown in the colder climate of Theris, grapes from the vineyards in the valleys beyond the stepped hills that surrounded the city, and mixed rice salads from the very same. There were even a variety of soft wrapped sweets in a myriad of enticing colours. Aurelia picked one and bit into it, marvelling at the sweet paste inside. She’d never had anything like it in Theris.

  It was their first official date, their second overall, but no one except them was counting the stolen day in the paddy fields.

  Or the stolen kiss.

  Faibryn wore a brocade waistcoat over a loose flamboyant shirt and trim trousers. His long hair was swept back, and his green eyes shone. It was hard to think of him as Faibryn; somehow the name Marcus had stuck in her mind and wouldn’t be dislodged easily. He flashed that dashing smile of his, and asked, ‘Are you going to tell me what she’s done, or just complain?’

  Aurelia realised she’d been staring. It was just that he was so handsome. And now she didn’t have to feel bad about liking him. If I forget about Nepheli.

  ‘Ma…Faibryn,’ she said carefully, ‘Nepheli has turned the entire court against me. I have been shunned and tortured for a week.’

  ‘I thought they were against you already?’

  She thought back to the venomous original meeting with the women in Nepheli’s clique. ‘Well, yes, but that was a kind of hostile acceptance. This is different. Now they are out to destroy me. If I thought I might be accepted marrying the Duke’s son, I was sorely mistaken.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, not really. Everywhere I go I have been verbally attacked by the ladies of court. Nepheli has a huge network I never really believed in before, and she has poisoned the whole city against me. I’ve heard it said that I am a foreign temptress who has seduced you away from the innocent Nepheli Opetreia; a witch who has flooded the palace with my magic and that you are under my nebulous influence, it goes on. My name is mud at court. And on the streets, I’m cursed. Mother’s make the ward of evil when my name is mentioned.’

  ‘So they have been talking about you behind your back,’ said Faibryn, making light of everything.

  ‘It is more than that,’ she said exasperated. She took a handful of grapes and talked as she chewed one. ‘Someone put a pig’s head in my bed with maggots crawling out of its eyes. I have been served rotten food on three separate occasions this week. I pull up the cloche and bugs fly out. I am hungry; I have been too worried to eat. If she can arrange for my food to be replaced with rotten meat, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to poison me and have her revenge.’ She ate a few more grapes, greedily. ‘Yesterday I felt brave enough to leave my rooms again after the hateful verbal abuse I received the first few days, and my door was locked. I was locked in my suite. That hasn’t happened at any time I have been in Argentor. Eventually Chrysaora came and kicked the door in.’

  ‘You are welcome,’ said her chaperone. Chrysaora stood only a few metres away; close enough for propriety, far enough for privacy. Well, maybe not quite far enough. But considering the situation, Aurelia forgave the proximity; she wanted her close.

  ‘I thought Nepheli was going to be a friend,’ said Aurelia. ‘She was so genuine. She wanted to help me convince your father about the army. But now it is clear she is out to destroy me.’

  ‘Really nothing you have described can be attributed to Nepheli,’ said Faibryn, taking a grape for himself. ‘It was never her insulting you, and you don’t actually have proof that she organised the pig’s head, the rotten food, or locked you in yo
ur suite.’

  ‘Why are you defending her?’ Aurelia wondered if she was going to have trouble with Faibryn still liking Nepheli despite the change in his political future.

  He grinned. ‘I’m only playing with you. Don’t you remember, I warned you about her?’

  ‘Well, it’s not funny,’ she said, faux petulantly. She did remember, now that he reminded her. He’d called Nepheli a vile socialite who would turn on anyone for the slightest infraction. A symptom of a court built on money and influence. But he had been betrothed to her? ‘Clearly you were right,’ she said carefully. ‘But why were you betrothed to her, if you disliked her so?’

  Faibryn raised an eyebrow sardonically. ‘You of all people should understand, my beautiful dove. Obligation rules our lives more than those of simple citizens. The honest answer is that my father agreed a betrothal with Ferdinand Opetreia in order to keep financing the war. Once grandfather died and the war stretched into its second decade, my father was forced to continue a war he no longer really believed in. A cornered man in many ways. The crown was short of funds, far too short to mount the kind of campaign that he knew would end the war. And so when Opetreia offered him the funds in exchange for marrying into the royal family, he was forced to accept.’

  ‘And that was the campaign that took him to Theris?’

  Faibryn nodded. ‘Yes. Funny how things work out isn’t it?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well if he hadn’t taken that deal and pledged me in a political marriage, he would not have gone on campaign. Your siege may have gone very differently, you would likely not be here. He would not have subsequently made the decision to scrap the deal, and I wouldn’t be sat across from such beauty now.’

  Aurelia never knew what to say when he flattered her. She liked it, she couldn’t deny that, but she was beginning to see that he threw compliments around with ease. How much of it was truth and how much was simply an act? How much of it was recycled from his time with Nepheli?