her instruments 03 - laisrathera

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “Use the… in front of you?”

  He smiled. “We could leave it in the room with you.”

  Put that way… but who used a bucket for things like that? Of all the things the Eldritch could have chosen to throw away, why indoor plumbing? Reese couldn’t imagine consigning herself to a lifetime of chamber pots, particularly one the length of an Eldritch’s.

  She was, however, thirsty. And she couldn’t fight her way out of this situation without energy.

  After they left she gnawed on the bread crust until her jaws started hurting. Bread the consistency of leather was another thing she’d thought her books had exaggerated. She chalked it up along with corsets, ill-fitting shoes, and horses being more fractious than advertised. One of these days she’d have a talk with the authors of her penny dreadfuls about all the lies they were perpetuating.

  That left her, again, with the wan candle barely pushing back the dark, wondering how much time had passed. Somehow she managed to drowse off, and woke up only when the guards shoved Surela back into the cell and slammed the door behind her.

  Any thought Reese might have had about escaping shattered at the sound of Surela’s sobbing. All her knowledge of the Eldritch fanaticism about touch fled her, too. There was no letting that much hysteria go uncomforted. She dropped to her knees beside the other woman and took her hands. “Here. You’re here. They’re behind that door. It’s over for now. It’s over.”

  Surela pressed her face into Reese’s shoulder and wept, and with a sigh Reese wrapped her arms around the Queen’s enemy and awkwardly petted her shoulder, her hand, her back—and came away wet with something hot. Her fingers twitched.

  “You’re bleeding? You’re bleeding! Turn around, let me see….” She peered over Surela’s shoulder and saw long, thin gouges in pale flesh. “What on the good red earth…?”

  “C-claws,” Surela gasped into her vest. “He had… he had claws. Oh, Goddess, he wasn’t even human!”

  Given Surela’s opinion of humans… and then Reese actually heard the words. “Claws?” she said, trying to duck down to look into the other woman’s arms. “Was it the shapechanger?”

  “He was a beast!”

  “Chatcaava,” Reese whispered. “Blood and freedom.”

  Surela wept until Reese’s vest was wet all the way to the skin, saying something nearly incoherent until Reese finally caught some of it amid the sobs. “I-I have b-b-been ruined!”

  “You’ve been raped,” Reese said with asperity, still holding her. “That doesn’t make you ruined.”

  The woman didn’t answer for long enough that Reese thought the matter closed—and a good thing, because she didn’t want to be feeling any sort of righteous anger on behalf of Liolesa’s enemy. But with a last shivery sniffle, Surela finished, “It does here.” Without lifting her head from Reese’s chest, she wiped her nose with the side of one trembling wrist. “Though I suppose it matters not at all. Either the aliens will kill me, or Liolesa will.” She shuddered. “Goddess, the claws. And the eyes. To be touched by something with a maw….”

  “Sssh,” Reese said, touching her hand again. “Don’t go back there. You’re here for now, and here nothing will happen to you.”

  “Until they come for me again.”

  “Yes,” Reese admitted. “Until they come for you….” She trailed off and touched her boot. Had they searched her before throwing her in here? Baniel had taken her telegem and her palmer, and if that had satisfied them… her groping fingers brushed against stiff metal and she inhaled. Irine’s pick was still in her boot.

  It was her only weapon. If an opportunity arose… but she wasn’t the one being dragged out of the cell. And in this one thing, she and Surela shared the same goal. Didn’t they? Of course, if she told Surela and the Eldritch decided she wasn’t able to kill her attackers, then the next time Baniel rifled through her mind he might find out Reese was armed. Assuming Baniel bothered to oversee the depredations being visited on the woman he’d sponsored to the throne. Somehow Reese doubted it; he’d probably offered her as a prize to the pirates and his guest, and that had been the limit of his interest. But was she willing to bet on it?

  Could she in good conscience not, knowing what they were doing to the other woman? Treason might deserve death, but did it merit torture?

  That she knew the answer to.

  “And if I told you that the next time they dragged you to the Chatcaavan, you would have a weapon,” Reese said, quietly. “Would you use it?”

  Surela looked up sharply.

  “Would you?”

  “You have a weapon?” Surela asked sharply. “Why haven’t you used it?”

  Reese pulled the pick out of her boot and showed it to the Eldritch: a metal needle nearly the length of her forearm. “They would have to come too close. It needs to go through someone’s throat. Something gruesome and decisive. And you could only use it once before they took it away from you.”

  Surela’s eyes focused on the dim glitter of the metal. “I… I would have to stab him.”

  “You would have to stab him while he was on top of you,” Reese said softly, to make it clear what she’d be signing up for. “And it’s not likely you’d survive the experience, unless they wanted to keep you alive for something else. But it’s something. And if it’s the Chatcaavan you get, and not just one of his hires… that would be a big step toward fixing things.”

  “It would not rectify everything.”

  “No. But it would be something. And right now, it’s something only you can do because they don’t seem to want me.”

  Surela lifted eyes dulled with fatigue. “Leaving you thus is his way of tormenting you. If he gave you some torture to endure, it would distract you from sitting here, fearing, feeling guilt for being whole. Pain would at least give you the opportunity to feel some pride, that you might be fighting through something, that you are fighting at all.” She shivered, forced herself to sit up. “He gives you nothing to fight. I think he knows that would hurt you worse than suffering.”

  The insight startled her. “Did he tell you that?”

  “No,” Surela said, eyes lowered. “You did, when you touched my skin. And Baniel is nothing if not a master of manipulating the emotions of others. He did it to me quite handily.”

  “Oh hell,” Reese muttered. “I don’t want to like you. Stop seeing the error of your ways, all right?”

  Surela snorted, a sound perilously close to a sniffle. “Fear not. I still hate aliens. If anything I hate them more now. If I somehow kept the throne after this debacle, I would raise an army in such numbers I could conquer the known worlds and send it against you all to keep you at bay.”

  Reese considered that in silence, running her fingers along the length of the pick. Finally, she said, “Who would you get to build it?”

  The Eldritch looked up at her and scowled. And then, suddenly, barked a laugh. “Ridiculous. It’s all so ridiculous. How easily I walked into this trap! There is no doing with you, and no doing away with you without involving you. And all we wanted when we fled Terra was to be left alone!”

  “We’re not all so bad, you know.”

  “Enough of you are.”

  “Should I remind you who threw us in here? You people aren’t all paragons of virtue yourself.”

  Surela stilled. “No. No, that we are not.” She lifted her chin. “May I take it?”

  Reese met her eyes, wondering if she could read anything in them, and not seeing much but anger and hurt and fear and the pride that was stitching the other woman’s tattered spirit together. Sadly, she could empathize with all those things.

  She passed the pick over. “Hide it somewhere they won’t find it.”

  “Don’t fear,” Surela said. She picked at her tattered bodice, finding a place where the seam had ripped, and from a broken channel drew a long, thin white bone. The needle replaced it, and once in was completely hidden. “They create their own destruction,” she said with grim satisfaction. “Just as I did
.” Surela offered her the bone. “To replace your weapon, until I can give it back.”

  It was more ‘if’ than ‘until,’ but Reese didn’t say so. She took it, and thanked the other woman, and together they settled in to wait. It was strangely comfortable. Seeing Surela like this had exhausted Reese’s need for revenge, had in fact shamed her for feeling it so strongly. Now all she felt was tired.

  “I’m going to rush them again,” Reese said, conversationally. “Otherwise they might wonder why I’m not fighting them.”

  “Perhaps they’ll think you’d learned the futility of attempting it.”

  Reese snorted. “If Baniel knows as much about me as you think he does, he’ll realize that’s completely out of character for me.”

  Surela glanced at her. “You are so obstinate, then.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.” Reese smiled a little.

  The other woman rested the back of her head against the wall, eyes closed. The dim light glowed on her skin, save where the bruises were darkening. “It would take a stubborn woman to bring Hirianthial out of his shell.”

  Her first instinct, to snap that Surela had no right to say anything about Hirianthial ‘the evil mind-mage,’ faded at the thought that Surela had known him for much, much longer than she had. “He loved his wife, I hear.”

  “He loved at all.” Surela sighed and smiled. “It was his best quality. And I say it about a mind-mage… and yet he seems far less evil to me now than my own confederates.” She was silent a while, then said, “Will you take him for your lover?”

  Ordinarily she would have had a flustered and angry retort for such a personal question, but in the dark, with the future uncertain, it didn’t seem worth it, to fight over it. So she said, “I don’t do casual things. I want a husband, not a fling. And what could I be to him, but a fling? I’ll be dead before he gets used to me.”

  Surela glanced at her without moving her head. “You’ll live longer than his Butterfly.”

  “Maybe,” Reese murmured. “But she died young and beautiful. I’ll die old and decrepit.”

  “Do you think that’s how he remembers her, in death?” Surela sighed and rubbed one eye with the heel of a hand, a gesture so vulnerable, so normal it almost made her seem… human. “I pledge you, his lasting memory of Laiselin was of her used up by the mortal agonies of childbirth. If I am not mistaken, that is not a hardship that will ever afflict you.”

  “That’s another thing,” Reese said. “He’ll want children….”

  “Which he can give you,” Surela said, irritated. “Haven’t you been listening to me? We can mate with humans. Both sexes. You lie with him, you will get yourself with an Eldritch child.”

  The idea was bizarre. “You mean I’ll end up with a snow-white baby?”

  “Who will outlive you, yes.”

  “Who the hell came up with that idea?” Reese asked, indignant. “What if I want a human baby?”

  “Then find yourself a human man,” Surela said. “But we are… designed… to propagate, given the right circumstances. We were human once. It helps us, to ensure the continuation of the race.”

  Reese shivered. “So you hijack wombs.”

  “And seed, if you want to be coarse. Men no less than women are fodder for the process.” Surela smoothed the broken lace over her knees. She was trembling now. “So no righteous rage over the inequality of it.”

  Softer, Reese said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to remind you—”

  Surela held up a hand. She drew in a careful breath, then continued, “So you can give the man his heirs, if you are willing. If you are great enough of heart to give birth to children who will live many years beyond your span.”

  Reese set her chin on her knees, hugging them, and said, “Children should outlive their parents, shouldn’t they? And if you’re a good parent, you want them to flourish.” She thought of her mother’s cold gaze, the sound of her voice when she’d declared Reese’s disinheritance. Thought of the eucalyptus that had been cut down, and her memories of napping in the boughs of that tree. Then she frowned. “If I could have his children, why did you say the hardship would never afflict me?”

  “Because you have mortal technology, yes?” Surela looked away. “Would that we did, and I might have used it on behalf of my liegewoman.” She was pleating the lace now, forming neat patterns broken by the rips. “There are some things of your making that are worth having.”

  “And some things of yours that are worth leaving behind,” Reese said.

  “Perhaps.”

  Reese didn’t push it. It was strange enough that Surela had been trying to allay her anxieties about Hirianthial, a man she’d supposedly wanted for herself before deciding he was some kind of religious anathema. Reforming the woman entirely of her anti-alien sentiments would have been too much. Particularly since Reese didn’t feel like grappling with her feelings about whether she liked Surela or not. She didn’t want to like Surela. But then, how many people had not wanted to like her? And how many times had she blundered into mistakes because of her own willful denial of reality?

  She’d never committed treason. But then again, she’d never been backed into a corner with her fears before. Not the way she was now. She had come here to murder someone, after all, and barely a year ago the idea of so much as hitting someone had nauseated her.

  Why the hell did things have to be so complicated?

  After a time, Surela said, quietly, “Thank you.”

  What could she say to that? “You’re welcome.”

  The candle burned to a puddle. The guards returned for Surela, and Reese fought them for her, or at least, that’s how she couched it in her own mind. Truthfully it was more like she threw herself at the nearest guard and got a face full of palmer for her efforts. They dragged Surela off and the candle guttered in its own wax and finally died.

  Would Surela kill the Chatcaavan? Would she even have the chance? Was Hirianthial coming? Reese curled up on her side and hid her head in her arms. Damn Baniel, but he was right. There was barely a bruise on her body and with every pulse of her heart all she felt was guilt and anger and a rising desperation at her own powerlessness.

  “This is my war too,” she whispered. “When will I get to fight?”

  CHAPTER 17

  “And this plan makes sense how?” Irine hissed.

  “One… it gets us out of the cold.” Val swayed, grabbed for her hand. “Two, it connects us with the people most likely to be able to help us. Three, it gets us into Ontine—”

  “Where Baniel is, and all his minions,” Irine reminded him.

  “Baniel won’t be expecting me to be alive.” Val put his back to the palace’s foundation, his breath coming in white pants. She joined him; the moist cold of the stone went straight through her jacket and into her blood, and she shivered. She could imagine this weather being delightful… once she lived somewhere with artificial heat. Maybe she could talk Reese into installing heated floor tiles, since the castle was half-ripped up anyway. A clan of Tam-illee engineers could probably do it in a few days.

  If they survived. Which brought her back to the Eldritch who was holding her hand so tightly her skin ached beneath the fur. She could feel the tremor in his wrist through their joined palms.

  “I can keep him from seeing us because of that,” he continued at last. “That is the limit of what I can accomplish, however. I need my strength back, and for that I need warmth, food, water.”

  “Kisses?” Irine said, idly, missing Sascha.

  “Only if you’re insensible to the fact that I smell like a corpse.”

  “Right. You also need a change of clothes. And a bath.”

  He chuckled, then glanced at her without moving his head. “This is what we have, Lady Tigress. Unless you have a better plan?”

  “I was thinking of climbing to the roof and letting myself into the attic. Assuming there is one. But I don’t think you’re up to climbing.”

  “Now? No.” He looked up. “A pity, sin
ce it’s not a bad plan. We will have to go with mine instead, and trust to the largesse of the servants of Ontine.”

  Irine sighed. “I hope you’re right about their loyalties.”

  “I’m not at all worried about their loyalties. Their safety… that, I question, and the sooner we know one way or the other, the better.”

  “Well, if it’s all we’ve got, let’s get it over with.”

  He nodded and started off, and she followed.

  Getting into Ontine, then, was as easy as keeping close to the foundations until they found the door to the kitchens. There were guards, but they’d all been stationed outside the perimeter, and with the moon playing tricks with the light and their hugging the walls, no one looking from inside the palace was going to see them without a lot of luck. Irine figured the Angels owed them some luck by now, and maybe they were listening because someone opened the door at Val’s furtive knock. He didn’t say anything, just moved a little so that Irine’s face was visible.

  “Come in,” the woman said in Universal. “Quickly.”

  They were ushered into a room and the first thing Irine thought was that it was warm, warmer than the rest of the palace had been. Three fires were burning in the same wall, and over them were doors, and along the tables lining the wall were loaves of pale bread rising. It was a dim room, tinted in sepia, and there was no wind, no ice, and no humidity. It felt a little like Heaven. Irine sighed. “I’d almost be fine with you giving us to that imposter woman as long as she kills us here.”

  “We will not,” the woman said, startled. “We would not. We are Queen Liolesa’s, to the bone.”

  “She is making a jest,” Val said. “It was not meant as insult.”

  “No.” The servant deflated. “And you have all been hard used, and the news only gets worse and worse.”

  Irine glanced at Val, found him looking at her. She cleared her throat and said, “Maybe you should tell us then. And… if it’s no trouble, we could use something warm to drink. And Val needs to eat.”