Mobius

by Garon Whited

  “Oh. Well, my short-term plans worked out quite nicely.”

  “Really?”

  “My only complaint is your teeth. You nibble too hard.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and added, “But I ought to remind you, while I’m open to doing this again, I’m not in love with you.”

  “That’s a switch.”

  “You expect everyone you take to bed to fall in love with you?” she asked, almost sneered.

  “Not even close. It’s more I have this idea the men are the ones who want to have sex without attachment. And you took me to bed.”

  “I said it earlier. Women have their needs, too.” She shrugged. “Everyone does. Ask ten people how they satisfy theirs and you’ll get fifteen different answers. You’re my answer—for now—and I’m happy with it. Is this going to be a problem?”

  “No, I shouldn’t think so. And, as I said before, thank you for the honor of being your answer. Let me know if you have another question.”

  “I will. And, if you feel the need, if you ask I might answer, too. I’ll take your orders as your warrior, but not as your kushimir.”

  Kushimir meant concubine, but it specifically meant someone who was not of the appropriate caste. Rather than someone hired and paid to carry out those duties, it was closer to a girlfriend. It still retained clear overtones of a dominant and subservient relationship.

  “Fair enough. With that settled, there are a couple of things I ought to mention.”

  “Please. Don’t get…”

  “Intimate?” I guessed.

  “Not that kind of intimate.”

  “I won’t. But if we’re going to occasionally ask and answer, so to speak, there are things you’ll discover. I’d rather share them up front than have you stumble across them and run screaming, never to be seen again.”

  She looked at me keenly in the dim light. With no windows on the second floor, the only light was from the open trapdoor to the as-yet unroofed third floor. It was fading, but not yet sunset.

  “I’m not sure if I should be offended by your estimate of my courage or concerned at what you have to say.”

  “All I ask is you promise you’ll say nothing, same as before.”

  “Hmm.”

  I lay there and waited. She continued to consider for rather longer than I anticipated.

  “I have one question,” she answered, finally. “Do you have a woman? A wife.”

  The question was tricky to translate, mostly because the word “wife” encompasses a lot of territory. The language included terms for something like a concubine or harem, but this wasn’t the same. In terms of marriage, there were more than one type, hence multiple words for “wife” or “husband.” There was a prime wife—or husband. Maybe the term “mate” is closer—The prime mate, the galvanais, is for the purpose of carrying on the bloodline and family name, but these could be nothing more than breeding agreements. Then there was a sight-mate, the rezeet, what I might call a “trophy wife” or a “trophy husband,” meant to be seen and admired, and often the face of the house in social settings. There might also be a work-mate, the vidat, who shared the other partner’s interests and goals. Sort of a co-manager of the household and its resources. One could also have a love-mate, a milette, married for emotional reasons, apparently in any combination of genders. A man or woman might have one or more mates for each of these positions, or all the types might be embodied in one, or the one might embody any combination. The locals are surprisingly tolerant of such things.

  A concubine or a harem, by contrast, were technically employees, not formal members of a household, but even they came in different flavors. The technicality, of course, being their status could suddenly change if one found favor—or disfavor—with a member of the family.

  Leisel’s question was whether or not I had any sort of wife—generically, a sayeva—at all.

  “I admit I…” she trailed off, looking for a word. “I did push you, but I’ve never known a man to be upset by it. Maybe not agree, but never upset.”

  “I’m not upset. And no, I don’t currently have a wife. I’m not against it, either. We can discuss it after sunset.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m laboring under a curse,” I decided. “It’s a hazard of going out and killing awful things. Sometimes there’s backlash.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll see.”

  I sat quietly while Leisel watched. I kept my amulet turned off so she could watch the process. She didn’t say anything during my transformation, but she did wrinkle her nose a bit at the smell. I waited, looking at her with eyes like holes and skin like charcoal. I thought about showing her the extendable fingernails, fangs, and the tongue, but the color change alone was enough to take in. I’m just glad my shadow behaved itself. No sense in hitting her with all of my peculiarities at once.

  She surprised me. Leisel crouched in front of me and picked up one of my hands to examine it.

  “Wait a second,” I cautioned, and cast my cleaning spell to at least put the goo in the chamber-pot bucket. I put the lid on it and held out my hand again. “Go ahead.”

  She rubbed the skin, examined the fingers, rotated my wrist.

  “It’s a hand,” she announced.

  “Well… yeah.”

  “Are your fingernails always so sharp?”

  “You should know.” She worked her shoulders and winced, nodding. It struck me that she complained about my teeth, but not about my fingernails. I wondered what it meant.

  “All right. You sweat like someone poured a chamber pot over you and you change color. This happens every time the sun goes down?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it all goes back to normal at sunrise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why haven’t I seen this before?”

  “I have a magic talisman to force my coloration to be normal at night.”

  “Wise. What else is there?”

  “Does there have to be something else?”

  “There usually is,” she replied, darkly.

  “I sense a history.”

  “Don’t change the subject. What else is there?”

  I licked my eyebrow and brushed my hair back over one ear with a tongue-tip. Her eyes widened.

  “Is it only like that at night?”

  “No.”

  “So, you’ve been holding out on me?”

  “Uh… no? Not exactly. I just—”

  “You’re in trouble for not telling me about that sooner!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be! Now, what else? Besides the ears.”

  “Sharp teeth?”

  “I already noticed those.”

  “That’s most of the physical stuff. What do you think?”

  “It’s… unusual. It’s strange. It’s not frightening, not to me, but it could be to others. It might be different—it would be different—if I didn’t know you.”

  “I’m sure it would be.”

  “Don’t make light of it,” she warned. “Most people would run screaming at the sight of a demon like you.”

  “I know. It’s happened. I try to be careful.”

  “What else?”

  “Let’s see. I’m a highly-proficient warrior, I work magic, I turn into a dark-skinned creature of the night when the sun goes down, and I have a tongue long enough to wrap around my own head. What more do you want?”

  “Whatever else there is.”

  “All right,” I sighed. So much for breaking it to her in stages. “Blood likes me.”

  “Come again?”

  “Not at night. I said, blood likes me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It crawls over to me and soaks into my skin.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “It only happens at night.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “Sure, if you want to bleed a little.”

  She
went through her stuff and drew a belt knife. She pricked a finger and came toward me, but I held up a hand.

  “Let it fall on the floor.”

  The blood dripped to the floor and immediately crawled toward me. I put a hand down to make things easy to see as it crawled to me and soaked in. Leisel watched, fascinated.

  “I have another trick,” I told her. “Let me see your finger.”

  She held it out and it started bleeding more freely.

  “If I’m trying to kill someone at night, they tend to bleed out rapidly. Now, hold the cut closed.” She pinched it shut and I worked my flesh-welding spell on it, sealing it up. She examined her finger carefully.

  “It’s still sore,” she observed, rubbing her fingertips together.

  “I saved you at least four days’ wearing a bandage. What more do you want?”

  “We’ll talk about it later. So, you’re… what? Under a curse?”

  “Sort of, yes. It’s a long story and I won’t finish it tonight. It’s hard to explain, but either I’m in a symbiotic relationship or I’ve adapted to being a hybrid.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, not really.”

  “I think I should.”

  “All right, I’ll try and explain my biology…”

  Tauta, 4th Day of Milaskir

  Leisel was not entirely pleased with my biological limitations at night. On the other hand, she had to admit I did get a lot done while most everyone else was asleep. She went to bed and I went to haul rocks.

  While stacking blocks in the cart—there’s only so much it will hold in a single trip—I was interrupted by Bronze. She tossed her head and stared keenly in the direction of the village. I caught her alertness and looked where she looked. It didn’t seem too unusual, but I saw a man climbing down from the watchtower beside the barracks. Moments later, four more emerged from a house, escorting a lady. She didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter. Her head was covered in a sack, her hands and arms tied to her body, and her legs seemed a bit wobbly to me. Three men walked a line of horses quietly down the dirt street. In a matter of minutes, they were all on their way, calm and quiet as you please.

  I really ought to wear my armor more often. I don’t feel prepared without it. It’s just so inconvenient to wear it all the time.

  “Did someone just kidnap one of my guardswomen?”

  Bronze thought so.

  “Seriously?”

  It seemed serious to Bronze.

  Annoyed, I grunted something, chocked the wheels, and unhitched her from the cart.

  “Let’s go see why there isn’t an alarm. We set up a bell specifically for alerting people to shenanigans.”

  Bronze whisked me down in nothing flat, stopping and blowing fire by the climbing-corner of the watchtower. I didn’t go up. I didn’t need to. I smelled blood, which gave me a dilemma. I saw a life up there, but it was fading. If I went up, it would fade much more quickly as all the blood rushed out. It was already running down one pole, hurrying to me.

  Fortunately, my tower was close by. I woke Leisel up rather suddenly. Two minutes later, she scampered up one of the four posts of the guard tower to check it out.

  “Get up here!”

  “I can’t. She’s bleeding.”

  “I’m holding her together! You get up here and do your finger trick!”

  “It’s not a finger trick,” I replied, disdaining the climbing pegs and scampering up another of the tower’s tree-trunk legs. “It’s a relatively simple spell to rejoin connective tissue—”

  “Hurry!”

  Up on the platform, the lady on guard duty had a nasty crack in her skull, but the knife-wound missed her heart. She was unconscious and bleeding into her lung. I didn’t see any physical damage to her brain, but I’m not a neurosurgeon. Still, it all looked like things I could fix. I fixed them, or mostly. Seal the wound, knit flesh together, tell blood vessels where to plug into each other, and persuade the lungs to let blood into the bloodstream—tricky, that one, but she was running low and needed every drop.

  Leisel glared at me, reining in her desire to ask questions until I finished.

  “Who did this?”

  “Those eight men who came into town looking for a job? I think they intended to pull one, not get one. They left with someone.”

  “Who?”

  “She had a bag over her head.”

  “Point out where she came from.”

  We looked over the solid rail of the guard tower and I pointed out the building.

  “Renata, probably,” Leisel decided. “She doesn’t live alone. There may be more people who need your finger trick.”

  “I don’t call it a finger trick.”

  “Whatever,” she shot back, clambering down the pegs. I jumped down.

  “You go in first,” I told her. “If they’re alive and wounded…”

  “Oh. Right.” Leisel went inside, called for me, and I came in. Two women with wounds were on the floor. One was beyond my scope; her blood loss was from a stab to the side of the neck. The other lay awkwardly, from a single blow to the back of the neck. By telling her body to breathe and her heart to beat—no matter what her nervous system had to say about it—the neck was fixable. I explained this to Leisel.

  “If they lose too much blood, you can’t fix it?” she asked, eyeing the blood on the floor as it crawled over to me. Cleanup at your murder scene is a breeze with Necrokleen, new from Nightlord Enterprises, makers of all sorts of undead products!

  “You’d be surprised at my limitations,” I told her, straightening the neck with fingers, tendrils, and extreme care.

  “But you can fix this?”

  “It won’t be done tonight, but yes. Now let me concentrate.”

  “What about Renata?”

  “Do you think they can outrun me?” Bronze snorted outside, briefly illuminating the interior. She stomped. The house trembled. “Excuse me. Do you think they can outrun her?”

  “Uh… no.”

  “Then let me work. Renata’s next.”

  So I aligned all the bones, gently pulled the various nerve fibers into place, and wrapped everything from brainstem to the C7 with a healing spell. It’s my understanding nerves don’t grow and don’t heal. Hers would. She would have some physical therapy in her future, but I felt confident she would walk, talk, and breathe on her own again. I wasn’t sure how long it would take or how many times I would have to adjust things, though, so I gave her the most powerful regeneration spell I knew and juiced it hard.

  “How did they do this?” Leisel muttered, pacing.

  “Surprise and brute force. Look at their hands and arms.”

  “What about them?”

  “No defensive wounds on this one. She was surprised. The other one, stabbed in the neck? She has a cut on her forearm. She also has torn skin on her knuckles and the edge of one hand. She didn’t have a weapon in hand and she struck her assailant. If she cried out, it was too brief to alert anyone besides the sentry, and they probably started with her.”

  “I want him.”

  “Can I have the rest of them?”

  “You? What for?”

  “I don’t want to frighten you.”

  Her response was not ladylike.

  “I’m not frightened,” she continued. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve done terrible things. I’ve been a terrible thing. Sometimes, I still am. Even I have a hard time accepting just how terrible a thing I can be. What I want—what I can reasonably hope for—is to be… less terrible, I guess. To be like I am around you, like I am here in this valley.”

  “A soft-hearted, gooey-centered sucker?”

  “We’ll discuss that later. What I’m getting at is I have the capacity to be something awful. I don’t like it.”

  “There is no amount of awful sufficient for this.”

  “Stop talking.” Leisel blinked at me and straightened up from beside the woman I was working on. “You do not understand the h
orrors I have committed. You do not know the regrets I have over atrocities I have performed. Ask me about them some time when we are alone and the sun is shining, because I will not speak of them in the dark!”

  Leisel was silent for nearly a minute while I focused on my healing spells. Brains are the worst, but spines? Spines I can do. They’re complicated and slow, but doable. I tried not to think about using That Voice. I didn’t mean to do it, but it was actually a good sign. My altar ego might still be around!

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “You’re right. There is… there are many things I do not know about you.”

  “I snapped at you. I shouldn’t have.”

  “No, it made me listen. You’ll tell me? Later? Because I want to know.”

  “I promise.”

  “Then we’ll talk about it later. What are you going to do now?”

  “Bronze and I will ride out, find them, and recover Renata.”

  “What about the men?”

  “If they don’t come back, they will have to be one of the things we discuss later.”

  “As long as I do get to know,” she insisted.

  “No secrets?”

  “No secrets.”

  “I won’t hold you to that,” I promised. “If you tell me you don’t want to know…”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I have a lot of repressed anger. Some of it may leak out from time to time.”

  Leisel swallowed. She and I looked into each other’s eyes as we spoke and I think she was remembering what my eyes look like under the illusion.

  “We’ll see,” she said, finally. “I’ll ask when I want you to tell me.”

  “As you wish. Now, I think she’s going to be okay for tonight. I’ll work on her some more when I get back, and tomorrow.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “I need you here—I need my vidat here, if you’re willing. Someone has to sound the alarm, run the invasion drill, and get the sentry down. And get ready for Renata. She may be hurt.”

  “You’re asking me to be your vidat?” she gasped.

  “I trust you,” I told her. She didn’t dither. She made up her mind instantly.

  “I accept.”

  “Take command of the valley while I go recover Renata.”

  “Can I help you into your armor?”