by Cat Rambo
It left in the time before dawn, trusting that Corint would still be sleeping and that when it woke, the rival would interrogate the innkeeper and be given the false story that Ector had planted, that Ector had taken the basket lift downward, headed to the savage tunnel jungle that was said to lurk only a few leagues on. It laughed to think of Corint, bewildered, searching in vain among fruitless dangers. It did not wish the other dead, but disaccomodated, perhaps even to a physical extent, was not unwelcome.
Then Ector thought that perhaps such vengeful contemplation was unworthy, would act to derange the perceptions, making them incapable of appreciating nuance. As it walked, taking the long spiraling trail that wound upward to the next settlement, it sorted through the objects that it carried about its person, the heart of its collection, twenty one objects, each representing advancement along a separate line of comprehension, towards perfect knowledge of the original emotion, and took each out in turn and looked at it, refreshing its knowledge of the object's essence and helping sway its soul away from any possible sullying of its evolving nature.
When Ector arrived at Halah, which was located inside a series of caverns, each with its own set of springs and a clever alignment of mirrors reflecting light from the sunstrip into its depths, the village smelled just as it remembered, a wet smell that crept inside the lungs and lingered there, moistly caressing the tissues until they burned. It was night so it took a room at an inn in the first cavern, thinking to go and look in the neighborhood where the artifact had been secreted, according to the overheard conversation. It occurred to him, a brief paranoid thought, that perhaps Corint had planted the conversation to divert its rival away from something else.
The inn, which took advantage of the direct light seeping in through the entrance, was built of stone, and unlike most, had several stories, due to the permissive height of the cavern. When Ector roused in the morning, from its room on the third floor, it could hear the sounds of the village and the inn, the sort of sounds that are pleasant when you're lingering in bed, conscious that you have no deadline. It drowsed, planning the day. The search would begin immediately after breakfast. What would the object look like? All Ector had to go on was the description of the emotions it evoked.
It was coming down the stairs. It saw her and became a him in an instant.
He stopped, dead still, on the third step, to the dismay of the servant following him, a Geniod with a load of linens in her arms, for she collided with him with a whoof, the force throwing the fabric up into the air until for a moment Ector was suspended as though in white clouds, able only to see the thing that had caught his attention.
It is of little use to describe what distinguishes a Geniod's sense of beauty when it comes to their own species: a certain evenness of features, a nose that slanted rather than curved, a particular curl to a fanged eyetooth.
Suffice it to say that she was beautiful to Ector, and he could feel changes deep in his body as he responded to her.
Ignoring the sputtering of the servant as she gathered up the cloth, he stared.
On her part, she took no notice, though it was unclear whether this was due to obliviousness or disdain, vanishing through a doorway that he thought might lead to the kitchen.
Once she had gone through that door, it was as though the spell that had imprisoned him, allowing him only to look and breath and hear the hammering of his heart, had been broken and he could move again. He knelt to help the maid with the last of the linens, but she only glowered, and did not thank him for it.
He took a Kihlain coin from his pocket and held it up, letting its light waver over her features, which smoothed into a mask as she eyed its promise and waited for him to speak.
"The person who just went through that door," he said, pointing. "Who is she?"
"That be the child of this household," the maid said. "The only heir and well-loved. When you eat here, you be eating the food that comes from her pots. She's famous for it." She puffed a little with pride but said nothing more, eyes fixed on the coin in his hand.
He spun it in his fingers, let it roll over his knuckles and dance back into his hand. He felt the weight of the moment on his shoulders; slowly it squeezed the words out of him, "And her name?"
"Trice," the maid said, and snatched the coin before it fell, because the syllables echoed in his ears like singing bells until he could think of nothing else.
He did not go search for his artifact that day. Instead he lingered over his meal, trying to find traces of her in the excellent soup, the limpid beer, the sausages as fat and feisty as fighting pups. Sometimes she came out, bringing a dish to the sideboard, and he tried to be the first to reach it, to lay his fingers where hers had touched, as though he could absorb knowledge of her through his skin.
Finally they cleared away, and he kept sitting there in the common room, waiting. After near to an hour, she emerged, her apron put aside, and a basket on her arm.
Springing to his feet, he approached, asking if she were going forth to harvest fungi. When she nodded, he introduced himself and volunteered to carry her basket.
For a moment, he thought she would refuse him, and the shy blush that rode her cheeks only made her all the more entrancing, for it is a known thing that the entity which proves elusive is ever more alluring than that which comes readily to the hand. But in the end, she assented, and he followed at her heels, holding the basket.
Little conversation passed between them, and when he asked her questions, her answers were short and brief of detail. But he didn't mind, because every sound from her mouth made him tingle from his head to his toes.
When they returned, he was horrified to see Corint at the common fire, giving him a sardonic look as it noted his newly-donned masculinity. But he comforted himself with the thought that his rival would go after the artifact, rather than this new treasure that Ector had found. In fact, he decided, he would give the rival all the information he had, and let Corint have the joy of its discovery.
He took care, though, to give Trice the coldest of nods. There was no sense in giving Corint any clue what was happening.
When he went upstairs, he took his pack out from under the bed and spread out its contents. He took up his most recent acquisition, a querulous flute of bone, its origin unknown, its surface spiderwebbed with fine cracks. Nackle said that one of the main emotions was fear, but that all fears came from a particular type, the fear of the world lest it hurt one. Ector put his lips to the mouthpiece and blew, so softly that it was less than a baby's first breath. The sound that emerged was sad and scared and resolute, but he could not narrow it down, because it was fear, he was sure of that, but the nuances in it were unfamiliar.
It occurred to him that if he fell in love, he would no doubt blunt his perceptions, undo all the careful work that he had undertaken to fine-tune his consciousness and make him the excellent artifact hunter he had become. But it didn't matter. He had a new purpose now.
He would write to his parents, tell them he had decided to settle in Halah. He would study to become a merchant, for what better way could there be to employ all the knowledge he had gathered in his wide-ranging quest? He was better traveled than the vast majority of his race, and he might as well use the fruits of that travel to earn a living that would make him a desirable partner. His parents would be bewildered but pleased; his grandparents less so of either, but equally ready to send him tokens of affectionate well-wishes in his new home: a blanket of knotted mushroom fiber and ceramic jars of fermented pickled cabbage.
He listened to the sounds of the inn all around. Someone in the room below him was walking back and forth, an impatient, thinking pace, and Ector wondered what might concern them. Downstairs was the noise of revelry and the beginnings of the dinner smells, wafts of scent that crept under his door curtain to speak to him of cinnamon and sage and browned butter with fragments of garlic sizzling in it.
He could scarcely wait for dinner, but he bided his time, went down only when he heard
other footsteps descending.
The food was unimaginably good. Roots broke open to send up steam, their insides flecked with pepper, and a tangy, pickley sauce overlaid the fresh greens. The meat was unfamiliar, but another diner said it was a bird newly come to this level, migrated from somewhere down below.
"They say it means an Opening is coming soon," Ector's fellow diner said, nodding wisely. "There are always signs and portents."
Ector forked another bite of meat and ate it. It was delicious, soaked in a sauce unexpectedly sweet and savory all in the same mouthful. The savor thrilled through him, and he closed his eyes, trying to pick out every nuance of the spices.
When he opened them, he saw Corint and Trice together, talking.
Fear clamped his legs and arms, a sense of panic that ran through him like electricity, made him as unable to move as an abandoned puppet. And even as he stared across the room, helpless, Corint's eyes met his and his rival smiled, letting Ector see his own newly-chosen gender, rivals even in this.
He did not want to talk to him, but he had to. Surely Corint could be warned off, or appealed to, or bought off? Trice was not an artifact, after all.
But, as it turned out, Corint had other suspicions regarding her and artifacts.
"The food's the clue," he said to Ector over too much wine, hearty swallows of it following slivers of cheese. "Is that how you found her too?"
Ector had learned, long ago, that silence often elicited more information than you thought it would. To other people, it often implied that you knew much much more than you were saying, and this proved the case with Corint. "Of course it was," he said before Ector could fill in anything else. "How could anyone produce such food unless they had learned to appreciate the ingredients, to gather them together in a jigsaw of tastes that fit so smoothly together that you cannot tell where one leaves off and the next begins?" He sighed, and his breath rippled across the surface of the carved stone cup in front of him. "Imagine that such a pretty young woman could hold the key to such a thing! She must have found it somewhere. Oh course I became male, it's clearly the best way to gain her trust."
Relief washed through Ector. Corint wanted the artifact he thought Trice must have, not Trice herself and now that Ector considered it, of course that would be why the food at the inn was so extraordinary. In contemplating the artifact, Trice must have absorbed its lesson well, in order to create such dishes.
Despite all their past difficulties, the happiness that surged through him at this realization made him regard Corint, good old Corint, always reliable, always there, differently. He decided that honesty would be the best policy. He would be a new, changed being now, one who spoke the truth in a way worthy of the woman he adored.
"I will help you find the artifact," he said earnestly. "All I want is Trice." He felt a pang at the thought of an artifact in Corint's hands, he couldn't help that, it was old habit, but he pushed it aside. What he was seeking was much better.
Corint regarded him with a trace of suspicion that faded at the sincerity evident in Ector's face.
"Very well," he said. "Help me with that, and I will help you in turn."
True to his word, Ector broached the word of the artifact the next day while he and Trice were gathering pallid watercress from the river that spilled into the Tube near the village's entrance. He did so delicately. He didn't want her to think that he attributed her skill at cookery with some force outside herself; he must let her know that he acknowledged it as part of herself, intrinsic. She had cultivated the sensibility that allowed her to cook so through no-doubt unconscious contemplation of the artifact (for she had avowed no knowledge whatsoever of Nackle when Ector had brought up the topic the day before.)
But when he edged towards the subject, she skittered away, sought refuge in all manner of topics: the mating habits of crawdads, the sounds of dying unicorns, the secret name of the Nihilex Queen and whether that entity remained the same person from year to year.
At length he gave up. She seemed relieved.
That night in his room, listening to the sounds of the village through the open window, hearing distant snores and stony echoes, he thought about when all his heart had been given to artifact hunting, less than a week ago.
Those days seemed as distant as though they had fallen down the Tube like an addled suicide, leaving only their confused and water-colored ghosts behind. He remembered the fever of finding an object that completed a series, the glossy joy that could color days on end, at least until the itch for some other part of the chain drove him elsewhere. Should he give what he had collected already, what he carried with him, to Corint? His fellow was one of the few who could appreciate the nuances of some of the objects; to do anything else was to waste them, surely, and if he kept his collection, wouldn't it just nag at him to go back to it, like the wine kept for sickness and cooking eats at an alcoholic through mere knowledge of its location?
He would wait. He would see.
He played his flute long into the night.
As the days wore on, he began to think Trice was some sort of Guardian; whatever artifact inspired her cooking was also her hereditary charge. Such things were not unknown; many of the artifacts that Nackle described had guardians of one kind or another.
If this were the case, to get the object and persuade his rival away, he must ask her to betray her order. He agonized over the ethics of the situation—what would Nackle have done, under what emotion would this worry have been placed, and what sort of artifact could possibly evoke it, other than the living one that was Trice, built of sinew and bone, of blood and hair and hands and eyes?
She knew he was wooing her, she acknowledged it, and let him speak of love and what he had to offer. But let the slightest syllable close to artifact cross his lips and she was on to other subjects, grown cold and distant one time, flurried and a mass of distraction the next.
He put on weight, eating deep of her dishes every morning, every evening. His pants were tight, and he discarded his belt entirely, then went to the tailor and ordered two new sets of clothes for everyday. He studied at the merchant's guild, working towards his license, and continued to stay at the village inn, despite the lack of economy the choice represented, since he could have (and was offered the chance to, more than once) rented a room in someone's house.
Corint also confessed himself unable to elicit any information from Trice about the artifact that allowed her to cook so well, despite his many conversations with her and his offers to assist her in the kitchen during the day, peeling roots, washing greens, and engaging in a myriad more chores that were, he told Ector, designed to find a chance to snoop and discover where Trice had hidden the artifact.
It seemed to Ector that as time wore on, the girl's parents regarded him with a certain sympathy. Sometimes they waved aside the payment for an evening meal, saying it was on the house since he was such a faithful customer. It unnerved him, the look in their eyes, it made all will ooze from his veins.
He tried to stop playing the flute at night, but it soothed him. It let him sleep. Unless he played it, he found himself waking throughout the night, every time there was a footfall or a distant conversation. The inn was in the cavern closest to the Tube and sometimes he could even hear the wind rushing there, a sound almost as sad and lonely as the flute's.
This had gone on for three weeks when he ran, by chance, into another artifact hunter, one who had not studied with the same tutor as Corint and Ector, thereby enabling an ease of interchange not always possible among fellow students. This was a human hunter, who lacked in senses but possessed the ability to make great leaps of logic. Indeed, after inviting him to a meal, she divined the circumstances in the space of time between appetizer and entrée and got him to admit to them in a series of pointed questions.
Her look, when the interrogation was over, was pitying in a way that reminded him of Trice's parents. The feeling sharpened when she tactfully steered away from discussion of his old obsession, as though i
t were a former lover whose new relationship might have saddened or infuriated him. The look was on his mind when he returned to the inn, determined to have it out once and for all with Trice. He would lay his heart bare, would explain all that he was thinking and feeling and hoping and perhaps in return she would embrace him or perhaps she would spurn him, but either would be better than this aimless existence, this void of not knowing what to do or say in order to gain what he so desperately wanted.
At the inn, Trice's parent stood feeding the little bats in the courtyard. The creatures flittered back and forth in unsteady flight, snatching morsels from their fingertips. The air was full of their squeaks, just on the edge of hearing, audible enough to be annoying and yet still out of range.
Ector said, as he approached, "Is Trice in the kitchen? I must speak to her."
The parent blinked. "She's gone to be married," they said.
Ector gaped. "Married? To whom?"
"That fellow Corint."
Ector stood in silence for a moment, his lips parted but not breathing. His face twitched, just below the left eye, a persistent, maddened twitch of nerves pushed past their limit.
At length, he said, "Well. I suppose that's one way to gain her artifact."
The parent set the pan of grubs down and clasped him on the shoulder. "Ah, lad," they said. "Corint told us of your odd obsession."
"My odd obsession?" Ector said, not moving, his tone as bland as unsullied paper.
"These artifacts, the ones you seized on due to brain fever and too much studying. You must realize they are imaginary, my good fellow. Corint explained it all to us."