Words, muffled but furious, unintelligible, snapped off with teeth and sucked-in breath.
And another sound: a rhythmic, dull pounding.
My heart began to pound too, but I pushed at the door a bit, and a bit more, until I could see.
Orlo was sitting on my stool. He was wearing a dark, striped shirt—only he wasn’t; he was wearing no shirt at all. His shoulders, chest, back and arms glistened with blood. There was a bucket on the floor beside him, and a cloth on the table, but he was not using them. He was hunched over, his head bent; he was slamming his fists against the table, one after the other. Borl was stretched out at his feet. In the brief silences between words and fists I heard the dog whimpering—a high, thin, unbroken question.
I whimpered too—I must have, for Borl sprang to his feet and ran at me, barking, spraying spit. Orlo did not look up. Borl lunged and bit the hand I had lifted to stave him off and I cried out, but still Orlo did not look up. “Orlo!”—I kicked, caught Borl in the ribs and sent him skittering back—“Orlo!”
He lurched to his feet. His shoulders were rounded and he had to crane to see me, and even then he did not truly seem to be seeing me, for his black eyes leapt and rolled like Laedon’s. “What?” he cried. “Who is Orlo? By Pattern and Path, who is Orlo, and who are you?”
Borl was beside him again, panting, gazing up into his face with one ear cocked toward me. “Orlo,” I said, and my voice trembled. “That’s you: Orlo. And I’m Nola—I’m Nola; why don’t you know . . .?”
He groped behind him for the stool and sat down. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Me . . .”
He shook his head, ran a bloodied hand over his hair. “Yes. And—” He blinked at me. “You. Ah.”
I took a step toward him. “What’s happened? What’s wrong with you—why are you bleeding?”
“I . . .” He was running his hands over his skin now, smearing. “Sometimes they fight me.”
“What?”
“When I try to take them—they . . .” His head snapped up. His eyes were focused, seeing me at last, but I felt no relief at this.
“Let me help you.” I walked to him. “Let me clean it off.” Be busy, sound firm; maybe he won’t notice your fear. . . .
I dipped the cloth in the bucket. The water was so cold that I felt I had awoken a second time, just as abruptly as the first. I wrung the cloth out. When I set it on his back he flinched—muscles bunching, so beautiful, so close. I wiped, dipped, wrung, over and over, and yet I found no wound on him—just smooth, firm flesh.
“Where are you hurt?” I asked as I dabbed at the hollow below his shoulder blade.
He frowned. “Hurt? No, no—it’s not mine. Not my blood.”
He sat up, stretched so that his back arched, and I saw his chest clearly (as I had not when he had been standing). Despite the blood, I saw the scars: corded, puckered, some white-healed, others purple, still others fresh and red. They crisscrossed each other from his nipples to the clenched ridges of his belly. I hesitated only for a moment; continued rinsing and washing, as if I was perfectly calm, not shuddering all the way to the soles of my feet.
“So whose blood is it?”
He stared at me. I could tell that he was no longer confused. He could have answered me, but he did not—just stared, with a small, tight smile. I could have waited for him to answer. I should have. But I was so alarmed by his silence that I said, in a rush, “Is it Prandel’s?”
His smile disappeared and his eyes narrowed. “Prandel?”
“Oh, Orlo—please don’t tell me you forget him too, again?” I was relieved that I sounded angry, not afraid (though I was afraid; was cold with it). “Prandel! Prandel, who killed Chenn—why don’t you remember him?”
Another smile. This one was slow and broad and familiar, but it made me even colder. Water dripped from the cloth that hung from my fingers, and these drips made light pink tears of his blood.
“Yes,” he said. He reached for me, cupped my chin in both his hands. His thumbs rested, warm and gentle, on my lower lip. “Yes, that’s it. It’s happened, at last: I’ve killed Prandel.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sildio came to me a few hours after sundown, last night. He must have knocked, but I didn’t hear him; I was bent over my paper, of course.
“Mistress,” he said, and I started. “I’m sorry—I don’t usually like to disturb you—but I heard you and had to check. . . . Were you laughing, just now, or crying?”
I lifted my hands to my cheeks, which were dry. “I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded very rough; when had I last spoken, had a drink?
“I worry, Mistress. You hardly sleep, and sometimes you don’t eat for an entire day.”
I stared down at my ink-stained fingers and cleared my throat. “I know. But I need to finish writing. If I don’t write as much as I can every day, it’ll be years before I’m done. And in any case, was it not you who wanted me to do this in the first place?”
He smiled. (He has a sweet, lopsided smile. I never used to understand why Grasni flushed every time she mentioned him; now I do.)
“It was.” He walked over to me. “But I didn’t say you should starve. Now hold out your hands.” I did, and he slipped an apple into my right, a piece of bread into my left.
“Sildio,” I said, “you’ll make me plump.”
We both laughed. Such a simple exchange, and such a simple sound, but they made me feel dizzy.
I must begin again, now, before I gape at sleeping bird, dog and baby all day.
The kitchen. Orlo’s clean, wet skin. His hand around my wrist, clamped like iron. And his voice, low and breathless, stirring the hair by my ear: “Nola. Let me show you one more thing.”
“But,” I said, “Prandel! Prandel—that’s wonderful! Where did you find him? Did you speak to him before you killed him?”
My words were ragged, some of them only half-said, for Orlo was pulling me, so hard and fast that I had to jog to keep up. He did not reply. He did not look at me, either; maybe this was why I kept talking. This, and my need to fill my own ears with words, so that I would not have to think. “You can take me outside with you now. Just for a walk, like I asked for before. Just—” A particularly violent tug on my wrist, and I stumbled forward, gasped. “Orlo, you’re hurting me!”
He rounded on me so abruptly that I ran into him. I did not recognize his eyes. “Take me out. Take me to the place where you killed him. I want to see.” I steadied myself with breath. “I need to see him.”
Orlo grasped my jaw and squeezed until I flinched. “Why?” he said, his voice light and mild. “Don’t you believe me?”
I did not know how to answer, but did not need to. He pulled me again and I lurched after him, into the entrance hall.
Laedon was there, one foot on the bottom step.
“Laedon!” Orlo cried. “Lae! On your way to the lesson room, were you? I’m glad we found you here. Come. Come here, old man.” Laedon took his foot from the step. He walked to us. When he was close, he swivelled his eyes to me, and he kept them there, even when Orlo spoke.
“Mistress Bloodthirsty Seer.” He was glittering: his eyes, his hair, his teeth, his naked skin. I saw suddenly that he did have an injury—a jagged, almost circular one that looked like a bite mark, below his collarbone. It was trickling blood. “Cut him,” Orlo said. “Now.”
“But,” I said, “I have nothing—there is no knife—”
“Oh?” He bent, groped for his ankle. When he straightened he was holding a dagger. Its hilt glinted with tiny jewels. Its blade was short and very thin. When I did not reach for it he gripped my hand, pressed the knife’s hilt against my palm until my fingers closed. “Come, Nola,” he murmured. “Do this. This one thing. Do it and I will take you to the castle. I will take you to Teldaru and tell him that you will be as mighty as he is. King Haldrin will place you at his right hand. Only do this one more thing, dearest girl.”
I believed him. I must have, for why else would I have clutched
the knife and stepped up to Laedon? I lifted his arm and twisted it round. He was trembling, which made me pause; he had never trembled before. I looked into his face and saw fear, and for the first time I wished he could speak to me.
“Nola.”
I thought of the castle’s soaring stone and Bardrem’s words—all of them written for the king, in hope. I thought of Teldaru, a boy facing a lord across a wine-soaked tavern table.
“Nola.”
I believed Orlo, even though I didn’t. My own hope made me set the tiny dagger against Laedon’s flesh. I cut.
It is the same scarlet landscape as before, and the same pain. I wriggle my toes and look at all the snake-roads and am just about to choose one when I hear Orlo.
“You see the paths? Many of them?”
“Yes,” I say, inside or aloud. The pain is blurring my sight and my mind, but still I think, He is not where I am; he cannot see what I do.
“Pull them toward you.” His voice sounds slower and deeper than usual. “Pull them into yourself.”
“How?” I want to say, but I am already obeying him.
I try a slender one first: lift my hands and think, Come here to me. The silver lashes at its far end, but it comes, jerking over the red ground. Soon it is a coil at my feet—so much smaller than the road it was, and slippery when I touch it. Slippery and moist; not just silver any more, but colours of earth, stone, water and leaf. I think, What now?—but again I know, somehow, my Othermind strong and certain. I raise the thing in both hands. It writhes and I nearly drop it; I squeeze and it is wet, suddenly: dark, flowing along my skin and then beneath.
“Do you have it?” Orlo hisses. “Is it in you?”
It is. It courses through me, leaving a trail of wind and flame. I am larger, making room; my eyes are keener, lighting on the roads and hills and seeing below them, to a latticework of bones. I am ravenous. The roads pulse and I grab at them.
“Slowly,” Orlo says. But I am too hungry: I pull them in, in squirming ribbons and knots, and moan as they become my own veins.
The red is receding. I notice this when there are only three paths left, because I have trouble distinguishing them from the ground. They are pale; the ground is pale. Sand. It does not matter that I can hardly see the paths; I smell them (rotting meat and fruit), and they are weaker than the others. I grasp them, absorb them, stretch my longer muscles and my thicker, wider skin. I am still hungry.
“You have done it.” Orlo sounds further away than he did before. I feel myself smile; I am alone. “Don’t linger where you are, Nola. You must leave the Otherworld before you lose yourself in it. Come back now, and see what you have done.”
I lift my hands and hold them up to the white-gold sky. I am alight; flame, in this desert. This desert . . . I sweep my gaze around its emptiness.
I have been here before.
“Nola!”
I turn toward his voice. He is there, in the front hallway—but he is also here, across a space of sand. How? I think, but then remember the bite mark, the thin trickle of his blood. I must be very powerful to be seeing him too, so effortlessly. He does not know, I think. And he will not feel me, if I do not try to transform anything. And I won’t, even though I’m still hungry. I’ll just look. . . .
I begin to walk across the sand. I am awkward because of my swollen body, but I do not care; I feel like a gathering wave.
He is crouched, his head bent. There is a shadow before him on the ground—not his, for the sun is directly above us. I have been here before. I have seen this before. I was above him then, a bird, dropping closer, closer, trying to see his face. Chenn’s hair was a spill of ink on the sand.
I stop. No—that was Prandel. I was in the sky; he was below her, short and plump. But above? I think now. How could I have been able to tell that, from there? I saw a man—that is all. A man crouched over Chenn, who turned into me.
“Nola—what is it? Where are you?”
Other-Orlo says nothing. I walk toward him again. With each step the shadow beneath him grows. It seeps over the ground, curving into shapes of arms, legs, lolling heads.
“Come back! Now, Nola!”
Other-Orlo is smiling. He is not looking at me. He is crouched on the edge of a dark, still lake of sprawled bodies and tangled hair. The small, jewelled dagger is in his hand.
“You will listen to me! You will come back to me—”
I see Chenn’s cold, bloodless face among all the others. Her eyes—one blue-black and gold, one brown—stare. Her throat is open to bone. I look away from her, wildly, and Yigranzi is there. Another limp, lifeless body—but no—she is lurching to her feet, her hands held out, gasping a word I still do not understand. Yigranzi stumbles over the bodies—so many of them, more with every step—and she is nearly there, nearly touching me with her shaking, knobby-knuckled hands.
Other-Orlo rises. He thrusts the dagger into Yigranzi’s belly, wrenches it around and around again, until she falls. He kneels beside her. She is bleeding. He sets his mouth to her wound and opens his lips
“Nola—”
—and I was screaming, thrashing in his hands in the entry hall. I twisted, seeking Laedon in the lightning-shot dimness of my after-vision. He was not there—not standing, nor sitting on the steps. I twisted one more time and saw him on the floor. He was a dark, broken shape; his eyes were open and still.
“You killed him too!” I shrieked, clawing at Orlo’s arms.
He clenched his hands around my wrists. He was baring his teeth in something like a smile. “No,” he said as I sagged in his grip. “No, dearest girl: you did.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I could not move. I did not even think to, or want to.
“I hardly even needed to tell you what to do,” Orlo was saying. He was still clutching me, even though I was no longer struggling. I was staring at Laedon’s body. I was thinking that I could have run away from Orlo and all the other bodies, deep and forever into the Otherworld.
“You took him, Nola—all of him. Every one of his paths; his entire Pattern. I knew you would understand. I didn’t want to tell you: I wanted you to find out for yourself how sweet this power is.” He leaned in toward me. My head was level with the bite mark on his chest. I could have moved just a little and opened it up again.
“This is the highest known form of Bloodseeing. The hardest. And you have done it—you have . . .”
He frowned slowly, and I wanted to whimper. I did not.
“You said ‘You killed him too.’ What did you mean?”
He does not know, I thought, and he cannot.
“I . . .” My voice tasted rotten, the way Laedon’s last, dying paths had smelled. I swallowed a cough which would have brought sickness up and out of me. “I was thinking of Prandel.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say. Orlo’s eyes narrowed.
“I hardly knew what I was saying. Oh, Orlo”—look at him, Nola, and press his hands a bit—“it was so wonderful and so horrible at the same time. How do you stand it?”
His frown lingered around his eyes but his mouth smiled. “Dear, sweet Nola—you will understand even more, soon. You will understand that taking a life in this way is pure. It is joy.”
My normal vision was returning. His face was sharpening, brightening, and I could not bear it. I lowered my head. “I . . . I feel sick. I need to lie down.”
“Of course you do! You must rest; you must sleep for a month, if that is what you need. Come.”
He lifted me as he had before. Before, when being held against him had made me ache with longing. Now I looped my arms lightly around his neck and gazed away from him. Laedon was sprawled just as the others had been. The only blood on him was drying on the inside of his arm, where I had cut him. The knife was lying beside him. His leather cap had fallen off. I recognized the fringe of yellow-white hair, but other than that he was bald, which surprised me in a distant, useless way. I kept him in my eyes for as long as I could, but Orlo walked swiftly up the stairs an
d soon all I saw were doors and darkness.
“There, now.”
No, I thought as he hovered above me. Don’t touch me. Go.
He bent and brushed his lips across my forehead. Stroked my hair smooth over the pillow. “Sleep well,” he said, and rose, and smiled at me, and went.
I lay stiff and sleepless and could not think. I needed to think. I needed to get up, break the glass of the cabinet, take one of the knives—though even all five would not be enough—and find him. Hunt him, as he said he would hunt Prandel, who had never existed. I needed to carve Chenn’s pain into him; I needed to hear him make Yigranzi’s garbled, urgent noises. I lay in bed and thought only about how I should be thinking, until dawn light began to spread across the ceiling.
When the room was golden-bright I felt a tugging on my sleeve. I rolled over and looked into Uja’s amber eyes. I did not speak to her, because I knew that a word would loose all the tears that were pressing on my throat. She gave a piercing whistle, which made me start up onto my elbow. She gabbled at me—a stream of sounds I had never heard before. They shocked my tears away.
“Uja?”
She chattered and clacked her beak and bobbed her head up and down so quickly that her colours blurred. She seized my sleeve and wrenched it violently and it ripped. I stared at the dangling lace, then at her. She waddled to the door, which was open. The door she had opened.
I sat up. The inside of my head flashed white. When I could see again I said, “Uja?”—plaintively, since I wasn’t sure, but wanted to be. She burbled and disappeared into the corridor.
He’s not here, I thought as I set my feet on the floor. She wouldn’t have come out of her cage if he were here.
I hobbled to the wardrobe (my muscles all hurt terribly) and opened it. If my old brothel dress had still been there I would have put it on, but of course it wasn’t. I chose the most opulent gown I could, instead: a thing of pink shell buttons and gathered silk and a train that dragged on the ground behind me. If I could not be invisible, I would be a lady. I fumbled with buttons and sash and slipped on a pair of white shoes embroidered in a pattern of purple vines. I turned away from the wardrobe and back again; I took a crumpled piece of paper out from where it had been lying, amongst the shoes. “Beautiful,” I read, and “Help!” I folded Bardrem’s note and bent to put it into one of my slippers. Then I turned and left the room.
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