by HDA Roberts
I hadn't even thought of that.
"Thanks Jen. Could you call the others for me? I'm going to check on that now."
"Will do. Don't leave the house again before we get there. This is starting to look nasty."
I agreed and we said goodbye. I was about to go looking for Tethys, but she found me first.
"How are you feeling?" I asked.
She was dressed in a pink tracksuit, her feet bare and her hair wet from her shower. It was good to see her relaxed and more like herself.
"Better, thanks to you," she said, coming over to kiss me again. I held her tightly to me afterwards.
"Are you alright to talk about it a little?" I asked after we'd sat on one of the sofas. “I don’t want to push you.”
"That’s okay, I don’t mind. I passed out just as Lexi cast the Portal to the prison and I woke up in a cell, wearing that hideous jumpsuit. I could only imagine the fun some pervert had dressing me up. The place was... off somehow. I could feel myself getting leeched away just being there."
She shuddered and leaned against me.
"They interrogated me for hours, asking me a whole bunch of questions about our operations. I didn't tell them anything, of course, and then I felt myself getting sleepy... and then it’s just flashes of that interrogation room and faces. I think I felt them poking around in my head, but I don’t believe I told them anything important. That’s all I really remember until you woke me up in the Conclave Building."
I nodded.
"I spoke to Jen,” I said as gently as I could. “She’s worried that someone may have done something to your head. Would you mind if I had a look? I want to be sure nobody left any surprises.”
She went pale, jumped up and backed away at a pretty fair clip.
"No!" she snapped, shaking her head. "Nobody gets in my head, Matty, understand? Never again!"
"Easy, Tethys, it’s alright, nobody’s going to do anything to you," I said as soothingly as I could, because that response wasn't suspicious, or anything...
"No! No Telepathy. I won’t have it!" her eyes were wide and staring. She looked like a trapped animal. I remained seated, not wanting to alarm her further.
"Tethys, try to calm down a little, okay? This is important, are you listening?"
Her eyes narrowed, and something... cold appeared in them, something dangerous.
"I'm listening," she said, but her voice didn’t sound right.
"Someone's been in your head, Love," I said softly. “And the way you’re acting is making me pretty certain that they either left something behind deliberately, or that they did some damage accidentally. Either way, someone needs to take a look and repair that damage before it gets any worse, understand?”
It was like a switch was flipped in her head.
Her expression went dead and she closed the distance between us in less than the blink of an eye, transforming between one step and the next. Great black wings erupted from her shoulders, and a bony tail from the small of her back, shredding her tracksuit on their way out. Fangs slid from her gums, claws from her fingertips; her forearms, calves and feet were suddenly hard and leathery, covered in natural armour.
Normally Mira would have acted to stop an attack like that, but because it was Tethys, she dithered a bit. I didn’t blame her for that, I was terrified of hurting her, and so Mira would have been as well. Thankfully, I got a plane of Will in the way before Tethys could get to me. In that form, she would have shredded me.
She went claws-first into my barrier and the impact broke a couple of her fingers before she tucked into the impact. She coiled to leap away, but I curved my Will around her and pinned her in place. She thrashed against the bindings with every ounce of her considerable strength, snarling and spitting to get at me.
Not daring to waste another second, I drove a Mental Probe into her mind... and was nearly killed by three perfectly placed Neural Shredders.
Horror at my near-death aside, I had to admit that they were works of art. The Shredders were constructed almost in perfect line with Tethys' Mental Architecture, only barely visible when they were sliding up my Probe and coming right at my mind. I shut down my probe, but I was too late, and a tiny fragment of one of the Shredders got through.
Faster than I ever had before, I erected a set of mental defences. They weren’t enough to stop the attack, but a blow that would have punctured my psyche instead glanced off my memory and detonated in the pain centre of my brain.
Like I said, a work of art, designed to shred some parts of the brain and hyper-stimulate others, distract, burn, enflame... kill. It was bloody perfect.
Having my pain centre set off was not a pleasant experience. It was more agony than I can really describe, but the closest I can get is to say it was like every nerve had been dipped into lava. I only held onto consciousness through sheer stubbornness, but I still lost my grip on the Will keeping Tethys pinned in place.
As soon as my mental grip failed, she leapt, her claws reaching for my face and neck again.
Thankfully, Mira was on the ball this time, and a great pulse of Magic knocked Tethys out before she could get to me, dropping her to the carpet.
In that moment, Mira likely saved Tethys’ life, or her soul at any rate. In the instant I'd had in my friend’s mind, I'd gained a brief look at what was going on in there, and it was bad. Her active mind was full of foreign commands and blocks, all grinding against her psyche, which was bitterly resisting instructions that went against her personality and inclinations. If Tethys had remained conscious, the conflict would soon have done damage that even I wouldn’t have been able to repair.
Still, that was a problem for a bit later. I was too busy screaming my lungs out at that moment.
Cassandra was with me seconds later, cradling me as I wailed (and not in any sort of dignified way, either). I felt unconsciousness dragging on me again, but I pushed it back with all my might, fighting against the pain with every ounce of my willpower. I couldn’t pass out. If I did, we might well never get Tethys back.
Those were ugly minutes. It was a fight against pure, unadulterated agony, with no respite, no escape. I had to use every mental trick I knew just to avoid going a little insane from that kind of pain. Eventually, slowly, so terribly slowly, the animating energy of the Shredder started to fade, and I finally came back to myself, or at least enough to see, think and talk again.
"Matty! For God's sake, speak to me!" Cassandra almost shrieked as I was coming back to myself. I finally noticed that Demise and half my Wardens were standing behind her, no doubt drawn by the noise I was making.
"He took a glancing hit from a Neural Shredder, you have to give him a minute, Captain," Mira said, her Avatar appearing beside Cassandra, making my Warden jump.
"Get me to Tethys," I gasped, my voice raw from all that screaming. "We don't have much time."
"But-"
"Cassie, now, please!"
She cursed, but heaved me over so I could hold Tethys’ hand. Proximity and physical contact made Telepathy easier and I needed every advantage I could get. I reached back into her mind, going much more slowly this time. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I was able to disable the remaining Shredders without too much trouble. Once I was sure I was clear, I went deeper.
Close to the surface, wrapped around the decision-making and emotional parts of her mind, were the foreign commands that had sent her into a killing rage. If the Shredders hadn’t told me who was responsible, those constructs would have.
Myrddin.
Of course, Myrddin. Even if I hadn’t recognised his power signature, I couldn’t think of anyone else with the skills to craft Neural Shredders subtle enough to evade me until it was almost too late.
That made me even more cautious as I proceeded.
This being Myrddin’s work, I never assumed for a second that the brute killing-commands were all that he’d shoved in there. Those were simplistic, ugly things. A last resort, if I had to guess; a final act of spite to k
ill us both in the event of discovery. There had to be something else, something deeper.
I slid past the surface of her mind and soon found what I was looking for.
His influence was everywhere. There was a massive, complex web of Telepathic Enchantments implanted throughout her mind. It was the work of a Master Telepath if ever I’d seen one. It was subtle and utterly elegant, perfectly in line with her psyche. The commands and alterations was so well implanted, so well crafted to work in concert with her personality, that I doubted we’d have noticed any difference in Tethys until she’d completed what she’d been sent to do.
If I’d examined the architecture and the commands, I probably could have figured out it was all for, but that would take hours, and I wasn't going to leave Tethys in that state for one second longer than I had to. The brute commands were still grinding against her mind, all be it more slowly now that she was unconscious; but they were still damaging her.
I started the extraction process, working very carefully.
It was horribly fiddly work, like pulling a spider’s web out of the cracks in a wall. If I pulled too hard, then there was a chance that a piece would break off remain inside, maybe even unravelling to damage the mental architecture further. None of this was made any easier by the residual pain from the Neural Shredder, which continued on as a sharp ache that filled me from head to toe, occasionally flaring up into a searing wave that left me barely able to breathe.
But I kept at it, watching for traps and anything vaguely self-destructy, both of which I found in abundance. I found Psy-Bombs, Mind-Jacks and more Neural Shredders, some of which were even linked together in a way that triggering one would set off the rest. It was terribly clever work, demonstrative of experience and skill well beyond mine. If all that work had been in the mind of someone I didn’t like very much, I’d have happily spent hours studying it, learning what I could.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that my new Affinity was the only thing that allowed me and Tethys to survive. That additional sensitivity, not to mention the extra speed within the Mindscape, made all the difference, allowing me to spot lethal traps and avoid triggers that I would otherwise have blundered into.
I was a good Telepath before Camelot, don’t get me wrong, perhaps in the top twenty in the world, but Myrddin... he was in a class all of his own. God, if only he’d been a different man, I could have learned so much from him.
Over the course of nine gruelling hours, I eradicated Myrddin’s work, every last bit of it.
I was even able to get a vague sense of some of what Tethys was programmed to do. As I might expect, she'd primarily been after the Blade, but there had been other instructions, too.
With what Tethys knew of Blackhold and with her level of access...
Suffice to say, if it weren’t for the paranoia of Jennifer Hopkins, who knows what Tethys could have done before one of us realised something was wrong. We’d come so close to a real disaster.
One thing that troubled me as I was wrapping up was that there was surprisingly little evidence of rifling through Tethys’ memories. When she’d been younger, Tethys had studied with a Telepath to learn how to safely store large amounts of information, not so much a memory palace as a memory bunker. It allowed her to store her informational memory separately from everything else, sort of like how you might lock your financial ledgers in a safe. A difficult skill to learn, requiring far more patience than I had, that’s for sure.
The system wasn’t impregnable, but it would have taken recognisable effort to break into, and there seemed to be very little evidence of that.
There was some, and Myrddin had certainly messed with her unsecured memories, but it was like he’d begun the work of breaking in to the secured sections and then stopped only a fraction of the way through so that he could put in the Control Web.
But why? What had stopped him? And why did the Conclave reveal her to me today? If Myrddin had kept her a while longer and extracted everything he could, then there was a damn good chance that he and his cronies could have done irreparable damage to my operations, not to mention leaving me penniless.
As it was, he likely got enough to prod the Conclave in the right direction and start Haughter’s farce, but that wasn’t enough to cripple me. It made no sense.
Still, those were questions that could wait.
Finally satisfied that all was as well as I could make it, I removed the Spells keeping Tethys asleep and came out of her mind. I found the room empty but for Kron and Cassandra, who were watching me intently.
"It's done," I croaked, gently prodding Tethys awake.
She sat up with a jolt and a shriek, her eyes darting around the room before settling on me.
"Huh- wha- how? Matty?" she managed. "What the hell am I doing here? Where's Lexi?"
"What's the last thing you remember?" I rasped through a very dry throat. Cassandra handed me a bottle of water and gently propped me up as I drank it. My legs had fallen asleep sometime over the last nine hours and I was in danger of toppling over.
Tethys looked puzzled for a long moment. "Portal to the beach. I saw our villa, turned to Lexi... and then... light, energy? Everything after that is... fuzzy until I woke up here. Will someone tell me what the hell's going on?!"
Cassandra lifted me up onto the sofa and I began telling Tethys what we knew, which wasn’t much more than what Tethys had just said. I wasn’t even sure that Ross was in on it anymore. Those had turned out to be implanted memories.
“No, it was definitely, Ross-” Cassandra started, but Tethys interrupted.
"There's no way! Lexi loves me, she'd never do that!"
"Well, why don’t you ask her yourself? She surrendered to us two hours ago," Cassandra said.
Chapter 44
"What?!" Tethys and I said at the same time.
“Oh yes. Walked in off the street and confessed everything. Confirmed your first story, actually. Why they’d bother to implant fake memories of the truth, I don’t know.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
"Dungeon. Demise is considering doing some unseemly things with that sword of hers," Cassandra said with a bit too much relish.
What the hell was going on here? Lexi really was a plant? But then why had Myrddin implanted memories telling us that she was? And if she was, then why turn herself in to us?
None of this was making a lick of sense, and I didn’t feel much up to unravelling it at that moment. My head just ached, and it was only partially a physical sensation. It was like my mind hurt, if that makes sense.
Kron came over and knelt next to me while Cassandra and Tethys talked some more.
"How's it going, Graves?" she asked gently.
"Ow," I managed, making her smile.
"Yeah... Neural Shredders. Got hit myself once, I lost ninety years worth of memory, my second husband was pissed. He blew up a big chunk of old Mongolia for that."
I smiled back, "I don't think I lost anything, I just got my pain centre activated."
She winced, "Damn. I hate it when that happens. Takes a while to get over that one."
"So, how much trouble am I in?"
"A lot. They're saying you killed eleven people."
"I did what now?!" I asked, actually choking.
"The Councillors you fought and their Hunters. They only found ash at the scene."
"That's impossible! They were alive when we left!"
"And they'll probably turn up again in a few decades, but for the moment, they're part of the narrative, and a bit of a problem, what with how you blundered dick-first into that trap they set for you. Bravo, by the way."
"That's not very nice."
"And you're not very smart. How could you be so stupid? And let's not forget falling for the trap within the trap," she said, gesturing over her shoulder at Tethys, who was now paying intense attention.
"What would you have done in my place, then?" I asked.
"I’m not a good example. I'd have actually killed the
m. All of them. Then I'd have burnt down the building, then I'd have compacted the ashes into a diamond monument to remind the next thousand years worth of idiots to never touch someone I love."
I didn't know what to say to that. Was I being scolded for going too far or not going far enough? Didn’t my head hurt enough?
"So what do we do?" I asked. "How do I clear my name?"
She puffed out a breath, “I don’t know that you can. The Conclave is using these ‘murders’ as a pretext for something, and until they show their hand, there’s nothing we can do to stop it short of deposing the entire Conclave. Since we have no evidence of wrongdoing, that would make us look like tyrants to the rest of the world and cause serious problems.”
"How bad could this get?" I asked softly.
"Oh, I'm sure it won't be so bad... apropos of nothing at all, have you figured out how to Teleport your house yet?"
"First, why would I need to, and second... huh?!"
She snorted, "The great houses can move when we need them to. It's easier than enchanting an entirely new property. Blackhold started life as an Austrian mansion in seventeen-fifties Vienna."
"How has nobody told me this stuff?!"
"There's usually a book somewhere," Kron said, looking around at my library, which was mostly fiction, graphic novels and Magic textbooks, "but then I'm not certain you'd know what a real book was. Can you not read properly? Is that what you need all the pictures?"
"Snob."
"Philistine."
I shook my head, still smiling.
"So what should I be doing?" I asked.
"What you were already doing. Keep your people close. Don't let anyone go anywhere alone. I'd consider a partial evacuation to a foreign property for a while, just the non-essentials."
I rubbed my forehead, "Tethys, do we have anything like that?"
She rolled her eyes, "Oh yes. I'll start setting things up. But I want to talk to Lexi before we do anything else. I'd like to know what happened... and why she came back."
"Yes, I'd like to know that as well," Kron said, her tone becoming suddenly frosty and more than a little terrifying.