My pepper spray has a range of ten feet and lasts nearly half a minute. It’s reeve-grade stuff, guaranteed to make you regret your poor life choices for a full twelve hours and leave you with an unattractive UV stain to boot. I aimed at eyes, noses, and mouths, and the knights collapsed, clawing at their faces and choking. Hopefully, Lindo checked for asthma when screening her personnel. I prefer to avoid manslaughter when I can.
Squinting through streaming eyes and holding my breath despite the scarf, I tried the door to the back room. It was locked, but a second’s glance revealed the key dropped carelessly on the desk. I unlocked the door, ducked in, and slammed it closed behind me to keep the fumes out. My eyes burned and watered already, and I didn’t envy the Lindo knights.
Francis raised his head to stare at me. Bags had taken over his under eyes, and he didn’t make any move to attack, unshackled though he was. I showed him the pepper spray in my hand to discourage bad behavior and checked around the rest of the room. Roald and Olaf were back here too. They’d been sitting and, no doubt, bemoaning their fates, but my unconventional entry had brought some interest back to their lives.
“Torben do a runner?” I asked, privately gleeful. Bad timing for trying to take over the prefecture, sir. Very bad timing.
Roald shook his head. “Not a chance of it. What’s going on out there?”
Even from in here, we could hear shouts and the roar of fire. “I created a diversion,” I said, and focused on Francis. “Have you explained what’s going on?”
Francis flicked his teeth at me. I ducked my chin at him, to let him know how childish I thought he was being, and turned back to Olaf and Roald. “There isn’t time to explain fully. The short version is that the prefects are conspiring to murder the king—”
“So Torben was right,” Roald observed.
“Torben is always right,” said Olaf.
I sighed. “The problem is, it’s all gone wrong. I have the evidence”—I held up the memory card—“but no way to get it to the king. You probably noticed that there’s no phone or internet service. Well, it gets worse, because I just tried to sneak out of here and found out that Avior’s put some sort of weird defense around the perimeter. For the record, I left the manor around eight p.m., and it’s now—what?”
“Nearly four,” Olaf said, checking his watch.
I groaned. My exertions in avoiding the children and getting to the knighthouse had gone a long way toward warming me up, but a deep chill lingered in my bones. If I had not been so well dressed—and had tonight not been milder than my first visit to Edenfield—things could have been so much worse. “So I lost seven hours, or thereabouts. And I was lucky.”
“Then we’d better get to work,” Roald said. “What’s on the card?”
I explained quickly about how I’d tricked the prefects into confessing. Roald and Olaf would need to get on a computer and find the relevant section, but afterward, even playing the clip over the phone ought to be enough. “Not that there are any phones available,” I grumbled.
“We don’t need phones,” Roald said. “Their radios still work—Lindo’s, I mean. We can send the signal outside the blanket and have them relay it to the capital. The sound will degrade, but it should be enough. Olaf?”
Impish glee lit up the young knight’s face. “I could get creative.”
So now we’d see if I was right in trusting Edenfield knights. I handed the memory card and blood-stained needles over. “I recommend tying something over your face if you want to go into the main room,” I said. “It’s pretty . . . atmospheric.”
The knights wrinkled their noses. Yeah, I guess they could smell it from in here.
“And you’d better do something with the Lindo knights I sprayed,” I added as an afterthought. “They’ll recover eventually, and they may be able to finger me as their assailant.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Roald promised. “Olaf?”
“I think I can find some old gas masks. Wait, where are you headed?”
I paused with my hand on the doorknob, scarf ready. “Someone has to deactivate the perimeter weapon,” I pointed out—then shot them a quick grin, gulped down fresh air, and darted away.
Hemmel’s truck blazed as magnificently and distractingly as ever. No one tried to stop me; no one even noticed me, as I traced the building around the corner to the children’s room. The window lock hadn’t improved any in the past couple of days, and it was the work of a few seconds to pry the window open and crawl in.
“What on earth—?” Sr. Nordfeld cried. He was awake and sitting up in his narrow bed, curiously vulnerable in blue flannel pajamas. As I pulled the window closed behind me, he got up, barefoot, to watch.
I twitched the curtains closed and turned the flashlight on. “Sorry about this,” I said, obscurely embarrassed and determined to pretend I wasn’t, “but I need your help.”
Stillness descended on him, the same stillness that distanced him from me whenever he was thinking I-knew-not-what. “You should not be here,” he told me, the stillness in his voice the greatest rebuke he could have given. “You were supposed to leave hours ago.”
“I did leave hours ago,” I said, “and I got past the knights easily, but the children stopped me. Look—”
I tried to rush through an explanation, but that sort of thing never works with Sr. Nordfeld. He made me slow down and tell it properly—otherwise, he said, how would he have the necessary information to make a sound decision?
I could hardly argue with that logic, so I let him walk me step-by-step through what had happened since he’d left the basement. What, exactly, had Avior asked the demon for? How had Deals & Bargains phrased it, when she’d announced the children’s names? And the girl, Want—she did not attack you in the woods?
“Ignorance didn’t either, until I tried to get past him. I think he might have been herding me toward Want, though, not just back toward the manor.” I shuddered, remembering what it was like to forget, the shame and despair that had made me want to forget. “I was almost lost. I think—I think if he’d been trying, I wouldn’t have had a chance. I would have forgotten how to live.”
“Most likely, if he turned the full force of his will against you,” Sr. Nordfeld agreed. “That would explain his name.”
I cocked my head questioningly.
“I have various theories regarding personifications,” he said, “and, unfortunately, only a limited pool from which to draw information. In my experience, however, personifications tend to embody not concepts in abstraction but elements related to human endeavor. ‘Deals & Bargains’ is the making and keeping of deals and bargains. ‘Cipher’ is the making and solving of puzzles. ‘Ignorance’ by itself is not a human endeavor; it is a state of being that describes a lack. ‘Willful ignorance,’ on the other hand, includes the aspect of endeavor.”
“And ‘Want’?”
He grimaced, tapping his thigh. There was still that strange vulnerability, but it struck me less painfully, since he had become distracted from it. “Grasping greedily, perhaps,” he said—“but that is only a guess. You must understand, I have not seen either of them in action, not seen them at all save when they stood dumbly awaiting further orders.”
I shrugged. “Your guesses are as good as most people’s conclusions. Care to guess at their weaknesses? I need some way to stop them.”
His tapping fingers curled and uncurled, restive, uncomfortable, unconscious—and belying the slow steadiness of his next words. “By ‘stop,’” he said, “do you mean ‘kill’?”
Perhaps some of that despair from Ignorance lingered, or perhaps I was right in having given up my job, knowing he would never allow me back whatever I said. Perhaps I wanted to sever that last tendon of his respect for me, and so make it easier to leave. Or perhaps the hard detachment that had carried me through so many difficult decisions simply had no use for kid gloves when the lives and freedom of an entire nation were at stake. In any case, I made no attempt to soften my, “Preferably
.”
His head jerked away, and the tapping increased.
“They’re not actual children,” I reminded him. “They’re more of Theodora’s monsters. If you’d seen them—”
“I hope,” he interrupted sharply, “that you know better than to judge by appearances.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I am judging very thoroughly by the appearance of Want biting nearly through Avior’s fingers and slavering at me in the woods; and at the appearance of Ignorance draining my mind. I am judging without pity the fact that no human would be able to do those things any more than a human could survive being decapitated.”
“And are you also judging,” said Sr. Nordfeld quietly, “that no human could twist space into a Möbius loop? That no human could see patterns and puzzles in ordinary objects or warp a street system simply by living nearby?”
I rolled my eyes. “Coconuts and bananas. You know you’re different.”
“Am I? Why? Because I was fortunate enough to bear the mantle of one personification instead of another? Or because I happen to be on your side?”
“Because you’re not a crazed psycho.”
“Ah! And humanity is based on sanity, is it?”
“You don’t eat people.”
“And yet we have a word for cannibalism.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And when people go that far, we call them inhuman.”
“Like Theodora.” Even in the indirect rays of the flashlight, I could see his face flush. He stalked away from me, stopped abruptly at the door, and snapped back. He’d cast his face in shade, but I could see the glittering of his eyes, the hardening of lines that had always remained comfortably soft. It struck me that I was seeing Cipher at that moment—or the echo of it. He said: “Not all of us were fortunate enough to be born with our personifications, Mercedes. You cannot know what it is like.”
“What does that have to—”
“I was eighteen when Cipher came to me. In my first year of university. I was sitting in class when it descended. Out of nowhere, it invaded my mind—an alien and parasitic intelligence crushing me, filling my eyes and ears with sounds and shapes, battering me with patterns, patterns, patterns. Impossible, maddening!
“Do you think it was easy to deal with it, because I seem well-adjusted to you now? I have had nearly two decades to trap and tame and force my personification to do my bidding, and yet it still slips from my grasp. The more I tamp it down, the more it sprays out the edges, distorting space. Never, Mercedes, never do I know for certain if what I see is what others see. If it is real.
“And despite all that, I was lucky. Deeply, terribly lucky. I was suited to my personification and it to me. Already, I had stretched and exercised my mental capacities in many directions, when it came to me. I was flexible and I had unusual mental power, and so I was able to develop techniques to cope with that initial influx. I did not drown in the flood of Cipher—or not entirely.
“Have you never wondered why I am permitted to keep a personal assistant in a secured government facility? None of the other cryptanalysts can. Have you never wondered why you were the ninth personal assistant I hired over the course of two years, and why I kept you around when I dismissed the others, many of them with far greater qualifications? It was because my sister, my dear sister who works for the crown and who interviewed you, chose my first eight assistants herself and tasked them with one duty: to keep an eye on Jon and tell her if he’d gone crazy again.”
“. . . Again?” I whispered.
“I warned her that I would not keep you if she did the same with you. I can tell, you see, by the way people look at me, whether they know. Well, she had finally learned her lesson, and so she decided to take a chance. She trusted,” he said, suddenly vicious, “that you had the brains to pick up on it if something went wrong with me again.
“Yes, Mercedes: again. How could I not be admitted to a mental institution after telling everyone I met about the endless patterns, the patterns that filled my new world? The secret messages on billboards and cereal boxes; the way the wallpaper whispered secrets as it watched me; the getting trapped in a straight hallway and walking forever without getting anywhere. If my family hadn’t taken me to a mental institution, I would have checked myself in. Eighteen is not an unusual age for schizophrenia to set in, and I knew enough to diagnose myself. I was glad when my family hauled me in and the psychiatrists drugged me and told me that I would get better.
“Except that I did not get better. If anything, I got worse. It is a terrible thing, Mercedes, to know you are insane.”
He shrank back another step, and I kept the flashlight down, allowing him to hide his face in darkness. When he spoke again, his tone was softer but no less angry. “I would still be there if my personification had not asserted itself in more tangible ways. Drugged as I was, I had no power to prevent it leaking out and warping the space of the ward, trapping patients and staff alike in impossible mazes and loops. That was proof enough for the head psychiatrist that I was not simply ill. She stopped the drugs and began in on intense mental workouts, teaching me—helping me teach myself—how to keep my mind under my control—not Cipher’s.”
He waited for my response, watching me, but I could whisper only, “I didn’t know.”
“If you had found out,” he rejoined, “I would have fired you. I have no desire for an assistant who is constantly watching me, gauging whether I have gone over the edge—again. My sister does not want me even driving myself. What if I have an episode behind the wheel? She thinks I have ‘episodes.’ She doesn’t understand . . . but it does not matter. What does any of that matter to Mercedes Cartier, judge of who lives and who dies? Jon might as well die. It is not as if he is human.”
“Sr. Nord—”
“How old would you say those children were, Want and Ignorance? Do you think they have gotten psychiatric help while being carried around in a pocket? By what kindness do you think Theodora acquired them? What deal did their parents make to get rid of their horrifying, dangerous, inhuman children? Because heaven forbid any wretched creatures like that deserve happy homes and loving parents and life.”
I could hear him panting in the darkness, over the distant yells of knights and the windy roar and crackles of a burning truck. “I’m sorry,” I said, because I had to say something. But the moment the words emerged, I knew they weren’t nearly enough—either as a response or as an excuse. “You know I think the world of you,” I clarified, “and so I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you’ve suffered, and I’m sorry that they’re children. I’m sorry of what you must think of me. And I’m sorry that none of this changes the situation—because I will not sacrifice the king’s life or mind—or everyone else’s lives and minds—because I feel sorry.
“I told you the deal Avior made with the demon: that she would give him a way to kill the king so that no one would know. No one. It might not be the boy’s fault that he’s Ignorance and going to wipe the minds of everyone who might guess at what the prefects have done, and it might not be the girl’s fault that she’s Want and is going to murder the king and anyone who gets in the way—but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re going to destroy all of us and that they must be stopped. Will you help me?”
“I will not.”
Simply spoken, with no room for argument and no intention of further explanation. A plain man in bare feet and flannel pajamas who would not be moved.
I wondered, as he must have known I would begin to wonder, whether this immovability was one of the things he’d learned in the mental institution.
“If you will not help me,” I said, “then I will do what must be done on my own. Do not attempt to interfere.”
“I will do what I think right,” he replied.
I had expected nothing less. I bowed my head and passed him without further comment.
Interlude
King Emil squinted at the shorter, broader, and darker of the strangers standing before him. He understood why the other m
an, the Edenfield knight, had come, and he was gratified by his loyalty. But what business had a Silvertip construction worker at the prefects’ conference? Why had he made it his business to help convey the memory card? The man had barely contributed a word, and he struck Emil as disrespectfully distracted.
“Explain,” Emil said to the knight, “how the woman on this recording came to be the new Prefect Edenfield. We haven’t been informed of any injury to our appointed prefect; nor have we approved any new appointment.”
“The replacement is temporary, sire,” the knight—Roald Steensen, he remembered—said. “Lord Holst had to, um, leave. There were threats against his life, and he didn’t want to endanger the other prefects or you by staying at the conference.”
“We were not informed of any such threats,” said the king, annoyed. “Tell us again this woman’s name.”
“Mercedes Cartier,” Steensen replied, nodding to the construction worker. “Francis’s sister.”
This roused the construction worker enough that he stomped forward. King Emil had to check his instinct to rear back.
When the worker spoke, however, his voice was a surprisingly golden tenor and oozed deference rather than aggression. “Mercedes figured out what was going on. She went to Edenfield to catch the prefects at treason and interfere. She has a talent for that sort of thing.”
Emil did not want to believe him. He tried hard not to believe him, to dismiss his evidence even as he had dismissed every other piece of evidence placed before him. He had resisted when his chancellor had rushed these strange guests in and insisted on playing the recording, but he had not been able to deny, even to himself, that he recognized Graça Silveira’s voice among the others. He wanted to claim that she didn’t mean it, that she’d been playing along with the others to trick them—but there was no mistaking the viciousness in her phrasing, the hideous fury thickening her voice.
Bargaining Power Page 37