Numenera

by Monte Cook

  Having Rillent in her head made her feel special. He’d chosen her, he told her time and again, because she was special. So special that their connection was a secret. The child that she’d been had believed everything about him. Except whether or not he was real.

  When, after so much time of talking to her mind, he’d shown up at the hall in person, she’d had a shock of recognition. From her spot along the back wall, she’d watched him walk into the central greeting room, where visitors came to meet the members of the clave. Even then, he wore the purple and gold, the broad wrap of fabric across his forehead. But it was his eyes – the purple, big as moons in her mind’s eye – that made her gasp out loud. I know him, she’d thought.

  She’d reached to tug at her mother’s sleeve, to capture her attention, to tell her everything. She still told her mother everything back then. Everything except about the man in her head with the purple eyes. Because he wasn’t real. Just like the ghosts weren’t really real. Like her nightmares where she was drowning weren’t really real either.

  But now that he was here, he was real, and that meant telling her mother.

  The man from inside her head looked at her across the space. In real here, real now. Zoomed in as though he were inside her head and not standing, flesh and blood and bone, before her.

  Hello, little one, he said.

  Special.

  She never did lift her hand to tell her mother. Looking back, she understands that moment as the one that changed everything.

  She stood still through the opening conversation and when her mother said, “And this is my daughter, Aviend,” and the man she would come to know as Rillent Boure said, “It is a true pleasure to meet you,” and took her wrist, she had let him and said only, using every bit of proper manners her mother had taught her, “Iadace. May your cyphers never malfunction.”

  Then her mother and Rillent talked about the Convergence, which Rillent said was a threat to all of the claves and all of the people the claves protected, but especially to the clave in the Stere. Rillent offered his services to help the clave protect itself. To help it gain power in preparation for what he called the coming war. She hadn’t really heard much of the rest, though, because it was boring grownup stuff and mostly because she had a new secret. And secrets, she’d learned, are the loudest quietest thing there is.

  Much, much later, she learned that she wasn’t the only one with secrets. Rillent had secrets too. And his were far, far louder than hers.

  She’d let the monster in, just to feel like she was special in a way that wasn’t solely because she was the daughter of Arch Enpelia.

  But of course, that was the only reason the monster had chosen her. So that he could use her to kill her mother and take over the clave. To gain power. To destroy everything she loved.

  I was only a child.

  But she wasn’t. Not at that point. At that point, she’d been on her way to adulthood, to making almost adult choices. That weight is one she bears each day. It is hers and hers alone. She refuses to let anyone else hold it or take it from her. She holds it so tight it makes the mark of her fingernails on her palm. She holds it tight now as she watches Delgha write questions out on her board. Her handwriting is small and perfectly formed.

  Why did Rillent pull the destriatch back to the kubric?

  How and when will he come for us? * – Faleineir already looking?

  What is he doing with the kubrics?

  What is his final plan?

  What is our new plan to stop him?

  That last one gets a double underline from Delgha’s careful hand.

  “I’m assuming,” Delgha says, as she taps her writing utensil to the last question, “that we are going to go after him again, and we’re not all just going to roll over and decide to let him get away with whatever it is he’s doing.”

  “That’s a fair assessment,” Kyre says. “Unless someone wants to say nay.”

  Thorme is seated at the bench, filling booster syringes from a mix of glass bottles of myriad colors. They’re spread around her like a rainbow. Unlabeled. Aviend has no idea how she keeps them all straight. Thorme is a brilliant enigma, and that’s just how they like her.

  The chiurgeon doesn’t respond, which is pretty much Thorme for yes. Or at least: I’m not paying attention so go ahead without me. Thorme doesn’t say much, but shortly after they’d met, Thorme did once say to Aviend, “I stay quiet so I can be the first to hear someone dying.” Aviend hadn’t known her very well then, and hadn’t quite figured out that was not what she’d really meant to say. Now she understood that the chiurgeon had been both serious and teasing in her answer.

  “I don’t have any other plans,” Aviend says. She’s aiming for light, but can hear in her voice how she falls short. “But I’ll let you know if that changes.”

  “Smart ass,” Delgha says. But there’s no actual ire in her tone. Maybe just relief. Since they failed, there’s a silence and sadness around the base that is hard to move around in. It’s thick and heavy. Moving forward, trying to make a new plan – that’s something to hold on to. It’s lightening things a little bit. Not enough.

  “Kyre,” Delgha says. “I know you had some qualms about the last plan.” A pause. “I know we all did.”

  “Actually killing someone, even someone like Rillent, you mean?”

  “Yes, that.”

  Kyre’s quiet for a long time. Aviend watches his face and is grateful for what he’s about to say. It’s hard for him, but she knows he’s been holding it inside for too long. “I’ve never felt such a mix of guilt and gratitude and relief and panic as when I’d realized I hadn’t killed someone. That I wasn’t a killer.”

  Aviend loops her pointer finger, taps the knuckle to his leg. Support. He nods slightly in acknowledgment. In his eyes is the same sense of relief she saw when he told her the same.

  Delgha draws swirling designs on the board while she thinks. “We need to make a better plan, something less lethal this time.” She doesn’t sound certain of their ability to do that.

  “Like tie Rillent up and throw him over the falls?” Aviend says.

  “Probably still lethal.”

  “What if we found a new way to show the people that he isn’t what he says? That he’s not actually working for their benefit…” Kyre says.

  They’d tried that before, had come up with a plan that exposed Rillent for what he was. They’d talked to the people. Stood by the mass graves – they called them wolf dens, for the copious amounts of wolflilies that grew above them – and reminded them of family members and loved ones who’d died.

  But Rillent’s hold was so strong. Too strong. People couldn’t see through him for long enough to break free. Those who saw were too few, too slow to awaken. Or afraid.

  “We could try to save more people,” Aviend says. “More rescue missions.”

  “Not fast enough,” Kyre says. She knows it’s true, but it still stabs her gut-wise to hear it. “Rillent’s power is growing. With each additional bit of the kubrics he forces the people to unearth. We can all feel it.”

  “And,” Delgha adds, “now that Rillent knows you’re alive…” Eyes to Aviend. “That we’re all alive and that we’re coming for him… he’s not going to go easy. We’ve given everything away. We don’t have any more cards up our sleeves.”

  Next to her, Kyre runs his hand over his hair, the way he thinks. He has streaks of white and silver now. Sometimes she remembers him as a child, his small face overlaid with the man she knows. It’s both disconcerting to realize how old they’ve grown, and reassuring at the same time. Kyre is one of the few things she still has in her life. After all of this time. After all of Rillent.

  Kyre glances at her. In his face is a question. Two, actually, although she can see he already knows the answer to the first one.

  “Yes,” she says, answering them both at once. “I think Rillent’s been in my head again.”

  Delgha tries to hold her utensil steady, but Aviend can see
the soft shake of her fingers.

  “So soon?” Delgha says.

  “I think so. It might be just dreams, my brain kicking stuff up after seeing him again. But I think I was awake, and it feels…” She wants to say, “like fingers reaching into my brain,” but that’s not quite right. It’s not fingers that bore their way in. It’s his damn eyes. “…It could be him,” she finishes.

  “Is he…” Kyre makes a gesture with his fingers. Asking questions. Digging for information.

  “No,” she says. “At least, not yet.”

  “Thorme,” Delgha says, her voice question and warning both.

  “I’ll send my runners,” Thorme says. “Find out what he’s doing, if we can.”

  It’s risky to send the runners, especially now. Right after their botched attempt at killing him. But she has to admit that it’s necessary. They need to know what Rillent’s next move is so they can plan theirs.

  “What else can we do until then?” Aviend says. The thought of sitting around, waiting for the runners to come back with news makes her feel itchy already. For as much as she hates running away, she’s never been very good at sitting still.

  “Heal,” Thorme says without looking up. “Eat. Prepare. You thought last time was tough? This time is going to be tougher.”

  The only sound in the room – the fall of liquid as Thorme fills the final boost – says how much they all agree she’s right.

  It was always hard to wait for the runners to come back. They were all antsy. Aviend was the only one currently taking it out on the cards.

  “Skist,” she announced, nearly loud enough for the whole forest to hear. She threw her well-worn card on the table. It showed a white nest dug into the earth filled with pale bloated worms. Deathbed. Losing card. “Skist and triple skist and may the broken hounds eat all your eyes.”

  “What if they just eat one of my eyes?” Kyre said. “Would that satisfy?”

  In response, Aviend mimicked Thorme’s hmph to perfection, which actually drew, well, not a smile, but a bare twitch of lips, out of Thorme.

  It didn’t matter that Kyre’s card, when he laid it down, wasn’t much better than Aviend’s. The deathbed card was always a loss. And the one who held it always a loser. It made him sad to see it there. Aviend so rarely lost. She was the sharpest game player he’d ever met.

  “That’s the third time you’ve pulled that card in a row,” he said, as Delgha and Thorme both added their cards to the pile. Out of rote more than necessity. This wasn’t a game where anyone won. It was one where someone lost. Not his favorite kind of game, but he hadn’t chosen it. Delgha and Thorme had vetoed any games in which he and Aviend were on the same team, citing unfair advantages. “Are you cheating?”

  “To let you win?” Aviend said. “Not on your life.”

  “I guess I should be glad we’re not playing for shins or you’d curse me with something worse than eye-eating,” Kyre said. “Do broken hounds even eat eyes?”

  “They will if I cut them out and feed them to them,” Aviend grumbled under her breath, and then pulled the pile of cards across the table toward her and started to shuffle them with practiced ease. Their edges were worn, but the soft synth had held its colors well over the years. The fronts were a mix of images in black and green. Their backs wore the mark of some faraway ruler. A king perhaps? Or maybe a whole kingdom? He couldn’t remember. A black tiger crouched on a red banner. He’d always thought the tiger was roaring, but Thorme showed him once how it was clearly yawning, and now he couldn’t unsee it.

  “Not your deal,” Thorme said, holding her hand out, palm up.

  Loosing another stream of swearwords, this time at herself, Aviend dropped the deck into Thorme’s hand and pushed herself up from the table. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not a sore loser. It’s just all this waiting is making me full of swears and bugs.”

  “That’s why we’re playing,” Thorme said. “Something to do with our hands while we wait.” As if her hands had ever been still. If she wasn’t cooking or patching, she was making something. Not devices or weapons, but softer things. Things that gave comfort instead of information. Thorme had joined the clave not by accident, but by… Kyre didn’t believe in fate. But they’d needed her without even knowing they’d needed her, and she’d appeared. If there was a word for that, he didn’t know what it was. Luck, perhaps. But he didn’t believe in that either.

  “Planning,” he said aloud.

  Aviend shot him a questioning look. He tapped his forehead, grinning.

  “It’s too dark in your mind for me right now,” she said. “We should go see if the runners show up in Delgha’s panel yet.”

  “Sit,” Thorme said. She dealt the cards, setting the first one down in Aviend’s spot with a deliberate snap. “We’ll know when they get here.”

  Aviend looked like she was about to protest, but then sat, still muttering swearwords under her breath. Skist was her usual preference, probably because it had the widest range of use. But she’d taken on a new one lately – brehmbrained cypher-grabber. She uttered it now, sticking her pointer finger at the sky as she said it. Not aiming it at anyone in particular, but more generally at the situation. It probably summed up nicely what they were all thinking.

  It almost made Kyre laugh, to hear her swearing across the table from him. So much better than the quiet, thoughtful Aviend they’d been sharing space with the last few days. Not that she wasn’t often quiet and thoughtful, but this one had worried him. Too quiet. Too thoughtful. Usually quiet and thoughtful was followed by bursts of ideas, plans, suggestions for taking down Rillent. But this had just gone on and on. Swearing at the sky was, at least, a step in the right direction.

  Delgha, too, was back in motion, after holing herself up with her machines for a few days. And she’d made him test her new device this morning, a blue nodule that was supposed to stick to the side of his jaw and allow him to talk to her long-distance. It fell off as soon as he started to talk and shattered across the floor, but at least she was working on something new.

  Thorme had sent her runners off a few days ago with messages for the well. Since then, she’d mostly been cooking. “The runners will be hungry,” she’d said, as if every bit of food wasn’t just to give her something to do.

  And Kyre? He’d fixed everything in the place that needed fixing. And a few that hadn’t. The cooler in here no longer made strange bird-chip noises. He’d cleaned the inflow valves on the riverpipes. Smoothed out that jerky spot in the lift.

  He hoped Thorme’s runners would come back soon. He wasn’t sure how much longer they could all sit there, desperately needing information and action, thinking about the dead and gone. He hadn’t taken up the habit of swearing at his cards yet, but he wondered how long he’d be able to hold out.

  Aviend was running the edge of her cards through a long L carved into the table. The wood was covered with names. People who’d eaten here. Passed through. Been rescued or had rescued. Others who’d never been here, but should have been. Nuvinae. Lyeg. Kyre’s father.

  “Kyre, your go.” Thorme nodded to the cards she’d dealt him, and set the remaining stack of cards off to the side of the table.

  He picked up his hand and was not at all surprised to find himself looking at three low cards and a single glowing black egg. Second Chance.

  The only way to not lose with a Deathbed card was if you could also play a Second Chance card. Unless someone took it from you.

  He did his best to keep his face impassive. Aviend had a knack for knowing when he had a Second Chance. Had a knack for stealing it right out of his hand.

  He watched her face. She was, he thought, going to make out like she had it. Which meant that she probably had the Deathbed card and was hoping someone would take it from her. Whatever she decided to do, he’d use to his advantage.

  “Two of Bills and Beaks,” he said, laying down the low card face up, showing the open mouths stretched across it. “To trade for–”

  The panel
in the tech room started whining, a sound that Delgha claimed to have modeled after some cute young creature she’d had as a pet in her youth, but all it did was make Kyre’s teeth clench.

  Aviend caught his eye, her grin full and quick as she pushed herself away from the table yet again. “They’re back,” she said. “Let’s go see what our friend Rillent is up to.”

  The runners were both exhausted, panting heavily at the table as the others loaded it with food and drink. Their title wasn’t a misnomer; it perfectly described their jobs. Run. Deliver the message to the well. Run back. Go on with their normal lives until called again.

  They were both wearing green coveralls that matched the shifting shades of the forest and they both moved – even exhausted – with the air of being faster than the body they were trapped in would allow them to go. But that’s where their similarities ended.

  Stiler was tall and thin. Everything about him was long – bones, hair, nose, nails. Even his voice seemed stretched too far out, low and lean, falling into the air through time.

  Perem was tiny and muscled, so compact it seemed like she’d been squished in from all sides. She sat curled up, knees to her chest, making her seem even smaller.

  Somehow they not only matched each other’s paces, but kept each other safe. Stiler was the messenger and Perem was the guard that ran at his side.

  Kyre knew little about them other than that. They all kept it that way on purpose. Sometimes it felt odd to work so closely with someone and know so little, but he knew it was safer for everyone that way. He wasn’t even sure if Stiler and Perem were their real names. It was enough of a danger that they knew where the base was and how to get inside. Not that it was a matter of them breaching that faith. More that if Rillent caught you, he made it hard, nay, nearly impossible, to keep a secret, no matter how much you might want to.

  They had runners on both sides, from the base to the well, and from the well to the kubric. Kyre had never met the runners on Rillent’s side. Thorme was the only one who even knew their names.