Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  I wake up with his hands around my throat.

  “She’s gone.”

  The whites of his eyes shine in the dark room. He squeezes. My fingers find my knife under the pillow. I can’t kill him with a knife any more than he can strangle me—we are just playing at murderous rage. Much as we may want to kill each other, we each have something the other wants. Someone.

  He makes a sound that is almost a sob.

  “We buried her at sea. My sister! Och Farya, the oldest living being in all the world! The first among the Xianren, child of the spirits! You snuffed her out, her light, her greatness—you stupid girl, you nothing.” His breath is hot on my cheek. I get the knife between us, holding it to his throat, but he doesn’t even notice. What is she going to do with a knife?

  He hisses right in my ear: “I will make you pay and pay and pay until the world stops spinning on its axis.” As if he can’t help himself, his fist closes hard on my throat, his nails driving into my skin. Gagging, I vanish out of his throttling hold, out of my body, away from the world.

  From early childhood I’ve been able to pull myself one step out of the world into what felt like an invisible pocket just for me, where people wouldn’t notice me at all. Handy skill for a thief and spy, and I reveled in it. But it was here in this very castle—months ago, though it seems much longer—that my little vanishing trick revealed its full and terrible range. I prefer not to remember, but my nightmares sometimes take me back to Casimir’s flat eyes, his fist knocking me to the ground, his boot smashing into my face, his elegant hands breaking my fingers one by one, snapping my wrist. Then it was like a wall fell away and the space I vanished into went on and on, all the way to Kahge, a hellish reflection of the world, a place where I am changed, monstrous—and powerful enough to kill an immortal. It is a place where none can follow me, unless I take them there.

  I’ve saved myself a hundred times this way—and nearly gotten myself killed just as often—but I’m no closer to knowing what it means, why I can do it. I don’t need to vanish to Kahge to escape Casimir’s hold on my throat, though. With my perception hanging overhead somewhere—nowhere—I can make him out in the dark: sprawling on the empty bed, hands closing on nothing. He gives an awful laugh and goes staggering out. I return to myself—to my body, to the bed—and I lie there, my heart pounding out the seconds, the minutes, the hours of the rest of the night until dawn lightens the room and I can hear the gulls crying.

  Pia takes me to see him in the morning. He is having his breakfast on a stone terrace overlooking the sea. He doesn’t mention visiting me in the night, although the purpling finger marks on my neck and the gashes from his nails are visible reminders. He gestures at the chair across from him. Freshly baked fruit tarts, strings of sausages, and neat little omelets are laid out on the table. He pours me a cup of coffee, the steam rising up between us. I’m not one to let murder and mayhem come between me and a good breakfast. I sit down and dig into a gooseberry tart.

  Casimir looks me over as if he’s really seeing me for the first time, then runs a finger along his cheek to indicate the scar on mine. I have so many new scars since the last time we met.

  “Who cut you?” he asks. “I should like to shake his hand.”

  “He doesn’t have hands anymore,” I answer.

  He laughs appreciatively and takes a sip of his coffee.

  “Let’s talk about the little boy,” he says.

  We’re getting right down to it, then—what we want from each other. Casimir wants Theo, and I have hidden him away. I want my brother, and Casimir has stolen him from me. No doubt he imagines a simple trade. Once I gave him Theo for a bag of silver, but I am so far from being that girl now.

  Of course, it isn’t Theo Casimir wants so much as what is inside him—a fragment of The Book of Disruption. The only fragment Casimir doesn’t have. If he can get ahold of Theo and get the text out of him, he will be able to reassemble that book, the first written magic in all the world. The consequences are too huge to imagine—Kahge would be pulled back into the world, and who knows what Casimir could or would do with such power? Mrs. Och was so afraid of this that she was willing to kill Theo—an innocent child, barely two years old—to prevent it. I can’t really wrap my head around the idea of a changed world—Casimir’s world. Maybe I lack imagination. I’m here to get my brother back, but it won’t be by trading Theo. I keep my face blank, force down my mouthful, and take another bite.

  “Si Tan, the grand librarian of Yongguo, has searched high and low, but he has not found the boy. If Si Tan has not found him, he is not in Yongguo. Where is he?”

  I keep shoveling food into my mouth.

  “He won’t be able to hide from me forever. There is no corner of the world I can’t reach into.”

  That’s why he’s not in the world, fiend.

  “Frederick took Theo, but I don’t know where,” I lie around a mouthful of gooseberries.

  I have to play Casimir’s game. He knows what I can do. If my brother is alive—and I would know, surely I would know if he was not—I have to tread carefully.

  “I find it hard to believe you have no idea where the child is. Pia, how long do you think it would take you to get the truth out of this mangy pup?”

  “Not so very long, my lord.”

  “And what would the damage be?”

  “Extensive, my lord, and permanent,” says Pia.

  Some days I almost forget to be afraid of her—I am so used to her by now—but her dispassionate assessment of what it would take to torture Theo’s whereabouts out of me makes me feel ill. I’m gambling on the hope that even if they force the truth out of me, as I know they can, they won’t be able to reach him, but I wish I could be more certain of that. I finish the tart, scraping the crumbs up with my fork.

  Casimir grins, showing too many teeth. “You have a good appetite.”

  “You have a good cook,” I reply.

  He leans back, folding his hands behind his head. I imagine driving my knife into his chest as I start on one of the omelets.

  “What are you, Julia?” he asks.

  Sometimes I think not knowing the answer to that question is the worst of it. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the truth is worse. I don’t answer him because I can’t, but I try to look as if it’s because I don’t want to.

  “Ammi—always with an extra trick up her sleeve,” he sneers.

  Is that what I am? An extra trick up my dead mother’s sleeve? Maybe the more relevant questions are, who was my mother and is she really dead?

  “My sister came to believe that you are the latest incarnation of Lidari, Marike’s paramour, or companion, or whatever he was to her for the hundreds of years he spent at her side.”

  He spits out the name Marike. The feud between the Xianren and that long-ago witch is the stuff of legend. She was the first witch ever to challenge the power and authority of the Xianren. As the first Phar of the Eshriki Empire, she once imprisoned the Xianren, stole the fragments of The Book of Disruption, and tried to assemble it herself. Turned out only the Xianren can assemble and read the Book, so it was a wasted effort on Marike’s part and sparked a few millennia of ill will. Never a good idea to get on the wrong side of someone who is going to live forever.

  “If you are Lidari, I’ve already killed you once,” he continues. “But I am skeptical. I remember him well, and you have nothing of his manner, his clarity of mind, or his wily, dispassionate nature.”

  I shrug and keep eating, but I file all that away—the bit about clarity of mind and wily, dispassionate nature. Doesn’t sound like me.

  “My sister was raving for days before she died. She claimed that your mother brought Lidari back into the world—a deal between the two of them, to destroy me.” He says this calmly, but his eyes turn an even flatter gray than usual. “So Ammi brought him back, and she very nearly did destroy me
—but there has been no sign of Lidari since. Only a daughter who can vanish and cross all the way from the world to Kahge and back again. Or so my sister said.”

  He seems to think I know more, and I wish I did. I try not to think of it—the possibility that Lidari is buried inside me somehow, waiting to reassert himself.

  “Lidari would want revenge,” he says, watching me carefully.

  “I have my own reasons to want you dead,” I say, and he laughs like I’ve made a good joke.

  “Let us put the question of killing me out of your head for now. I am not fading like my sister was. You can’t harm me in any of the ways you might harm a mortal man, but perhaps you think that in Kahge you could harm me—if you could take me there.”

  “It does sound fun,” I say. My heart is pounding like a war drum under my falsely light tone. I’m still and waiting at the center of the whirlwind.

  “I lost myself last night. Later I found your skin under my fingernails.” He spits on the stone terrace, like he’s spitting out the taste of the memory. “Disgusted as I was, it occurred to me that I might make use of a bit of your skin. I called for Shey. She used the flesh and put this upon me.” He unbuttons his shirt and reveals a symbol tattooed over his sternum. “She wondered that I should have any need to fear you, but she did as I asked all the same. The needle used to write the spell was cast into the sea. I tell you that only so you don’t bother looking for it.” He grins at my expression. “I can see I’ve alarmed you, but this is only a matter of self-protection. Try to touch me. You could throw that knife at me, if you like.”

  I pick up the knife next to my plate and look it over. He spreads his arms wide. I glance at Pia, but she is peering over our heads, expressionless.

  I hurl the knife at him. It veers off to the side, clatters to the ground.

  He reaches across the table. “Take my hand.”

  “I don’t want to take your ugly hand,” I say, shaken.

  “This is a demonstration. Take my hand.”

  I reach for his hand, but my own hand is repelled by some force I can’t see. I make another grab; again my hand flies back toward me. Casimir gives a satisfied nod.

  “So I can’t touch you,” I say. “No great loss.”

  “Not with your hands, nor with anything else,” he says. “I thought it wise to get that out of the way. Now we can focus on the important things. If I don’t find the boy soon, Pia will have to get his whereabouts out of you. I hope it won’t come to that, as it would likely destroy you, and I have other plans for you. I’d like to keep you in one piece if I can. Bodily, at least.”

  I finish the omelet, mop up what’s left on my plate with a piece of bread, and wash it all down with black coffee. When I’m sure my voice will come out steady, I say again: “Where’s my brother?”

  The mask drops, and Casimir opens his mouth. His lips flatten back against his gums, but no sound comes out into the air. Instead, a deafening roar erupts inside my own head, jolting me out of my seat. He opens his mouth wider, and the sound grows, exploding against the inside of my skull, blotting out everything else. I am up and flailing—I cannot see; I clap my hands over my ears, but that doesn’t help at all, as the sound is coming from within, not without. The roar rises to a terrible pitch, a piercing wail that shatters me. I hit the ground, my whole world a howling darkness, the volume unbearable; I know nothing, I remember nothing; it hurts it hurts it hurts.

  And then silence.

  I pull in a shaky breath. Blood is pooling inside my mouth—I must have bitten my tongue. I open my eyes. I am lying on the terrace, and Casimir is bending over me, the knife he was eating with pointed at my throat, his awful eyes fixed on mine. A sound comes out of me, like the whimper of a wounded animal. Something wet is trickling out of my nose.

  “Unlike me, you are easy to kill,” he says softly. “A knife in the right place. A blow to the head. A bit of poison. A high ledge. There are so many ways to kill you that it positively boggles the imagination. I did not know what you could do the last time we met. But I am ready for you now.”

  He walks away from me. I roll onto my side and wipe my sleeve against my nose; it comes away red and sticky with blood. I make another sobbing noise and hate myself for it. Everything hurts.

  “Think yourself lucky that you still have a brother after taking my sister from me.” He stands rigid at the parapet for a moment, and then without turning around he says to Pia: “Take her now. Take care of the whole thing. I don’t want to look at her again.”

  “Come,” says Pia, helping me up. When she sees my expression, her voice drops slightly, losing its shattering edge: “Your brother will be fine. You should worry about yourself.”

  Two men are bent over a diagram spread across a table. They look up when we come in. Dek sees me, and his face falls.

  “Oh, Julia,” he says. “I’d hoped it wasn’t true.”

  I shout something inarticulate, bounding across the room and throwing my arms around him. The temptation to pull him right out of the world and away from this place is tremendous, even though I know they would never let me near him if there weren’t a catch of some kind. But oh, the relief and the joy of seeing him, well and whole and unharmed. It registers a moment late—something changed in his face, his arms around me, both his arms. I pull back, suddenly sick with fear.

  “What’s happened? What have they done?”

  My brother was strong and fast once, a beautiful boy with a laughing face and bright eyes, and I followed him everywhere. Eleven summers ago, Scourge swept across Frayne, striking thousands in our city alone—including my brother. It was rare for a child to survive, but our mother was a witch, and she turned the illness back. Ma was never the same after that, and the Scourge ravaged the right side of Dek’s body before she was able to stop it, the arm and leg left withered and useless, the eye eaten away, that side of his face marred by scars and blots.

  Now the skin there is smooth and shiny, paler than the rest of his face. There is a glass eye in his empty eye socket—brown, but a lighter brown than his other eye, so that his face appears to show two Deks: the real one, and a false, fairer copy. He looks a little strange, but he does not look like a Scourge victim. He does not really look like himself.

  “Your crutch…,” I say, and he laughs. He is standing on two legs. The arm that normally hangs thin and useless at his side is still wrapped around my shoulders.

  The laugh is genuine, but his voice sounds so sad: “Julia, I’m sorry….You’re hurt.”

  Yes. No. How can I answer? The glass eye disturbs me; I can’t look at it.

  “Not badly,” I say, though my head is throbbing—I hit it on the terrace, throwing myself to the ground. I pull his arm off me, take his right hand in mine, and look at it. Metal hinges at the knuckles. He flexes the fingers.

  “What’s going on? And who is this?” I ask.

  “My name is Savio,” says the other man, bowing. I can’t place his accent. He is an innocuous-looking fellow, with light brown skin and large, liquid eyes—unusually wet-looking, as if he were on the edge of tears. “I am Casimir’s mechanic.”

  He unbuttons his cuff and rolls his sleeve up to show me the silvery disk in the skin of his wrist: Casimir’s contract.

  I look at Pia.

  “He is good at what he does,” she says, spreading her arms as if to display herself. Pia was once sent to assassinate Casimir. She told me that after he broke her—bodily and in spirit—his mechanic put her back together. Rebuilt her into something new. Put Casimir’s contract inside her.

  “So you can walk now?” I say slowly.

  “Walk. Run. Jump. Dance,” says Dek, but I can’t figure out his expression. That glass eye is throwing me off, making him unreadable. “With some practice, anyway. He was just showing me the diagrams. It will take a bit of getting used to. The limbs feel heavy, and the nerv
e connections are still new. I’m tripping and dropping things a lot, but he says it will get better.”

  Dek is a gifted inventor himself, but neither of us ever dreamed that such a thing was possible—the building of new limbs.

  “Why?” I ask.

  The mechanic gives me a quizzical look, so I make myself elaborate: “Why did you do it?”

  “As a gift,” says the mechanic. “Casimir can be good to you or he can crush you. Let your brother be a lesson in both.”

  I’m cold with terror now but unable to find the right question. I look at Dek as he casts his eye down and begins to unbutton his shirt. The fingers of his right hand above the hinges are pale and waxy, working clumsily with the buttons, while his other hand, the one he’s relied on for years, is deft. He can unbutton a shirt easily with one hand—he’s using the other deliberately, for practice. He opens his shirt to show me the long, lurid scar down the middle of his chest.

  “What is it?”

  “I have fastened to your brother’s heart a sac of poison,” says the mechanic, and I feel my stomach plunge with every word. “The sac will degrade naturally inside the body. It has been one week already. It will take another twenty days. Once the sac degrades and the poison touches the heart, he will be killed instantly.”

  There it is. Dek buttons his shirt up, his face showing nothing.

  “Can it be taken out?”

  “You understand”—Savio shows me again the silvery disk in his wrist—“I cannot do anything without Casimir’s consent. You could threaten my life, torture me, and still my contract would simply prevent me from removing the sac of poison. I cannot operate until Casimir says it is to be done. But when he bids me do it—then, yes—it is a complicated procedure, not without risk, but I could remove the poison and he would live.”

  I should have been expecting something like this. Except of course I had no idea something like this was even possible. I knew they would try to hold Dek hostage in some way to compel me, but I thought I would find a way around it, that I would rescue him, vanishing us away from whatever threats Casimir devised. I did not imagine the threat placed inside Dek’s body.