by Lucia Ashta
I stared at my friend openly, unconcerned with the normal courtesies that would suggest that I not stare at an unusual-looking person. I saw his eyes turn to Kai who stood behind me, off to one side. I turned around.
“Is this Dolpheus?” Kai asked, unsuccessful at keeping the surprise from his voice.
Dolpheus laughed behind me. It was a loud, deep laugh that instantly put me at ease, even if my best friend was in the body of a weaselly-looking courtier. “Aye. I am. Though don’t worry, lad. I don’t usually look as dumpy as this. And who are you?”
“I’m Kai,” he said shyly, suddenly aware of what a large presence my friend could have, no matter what body he happened to be occupying at the moment.
“Kai helped me escape from the palace,” I said.
“He’s a royal guard.” Dolpheus stated the obvious, given Kai’s gray and red uniform.
“He was. He’s chosen to join us now.”
When Dolpheus took a bit too long to study him, I added, “He’s a good man.”
“He must be,” Dolpheus said. It was unusual for me to be so trusting of someone new and to invite him into our private circle that normally consisted of just the two of us. It seemed as if there were some kind of emotion behind Dolpheus’ brief comment. However, it was too disconcerting to see him in another man’s body to put my finger on what exactly that emotion might be.
“And what of you?” I asked. “How is it that you look exactly like Lord Dingaling?”
“Well, it turns out that Lord Dingaling is a frequent client of your father’s splicing facility and that Lila has a few unexpected tricks stashed away in that baggy lab suit of hers.”
“Is that so, Lila?” I offered a tentative smile in entreaty. I wasn’t certain how to react to her right then. Obviously, a lot had gone down since I last saw her. “This was your doing then?” I knew it had to be. I’d never seen anything like this before. I didn’t know it was possible.
“It is.” She offered me a provisional smile in return. It seemed that we might be renegotiating our relationship. She was proving her usefulness, and we were showing her that she was no longer a captive, it didn’t really matter much that she’d been the one to remove herself from our control.
“How did you do it?” I asked. “I’ve never seen something like this done before. This goes beyond any disguise. The match is exact.” I hadn’t had the displeasure of interacting with Lord Dingaling much. But I’d seen him at the palace, milling around uselessly under the guise of pompous importance often enough.
“I told you that I’m in the work of checking the splicing patients on a regular basis. I check all their bodily systems. Maybe about a year ago I discovered that I could also check that part of themselves that determined their physical appearance. I started to do it as my own side experiment, to see if a client’s impression of himself changed the more often we extracted the eternality. No one needed to know. I could extract the data at the same time and in the same way as I performed all the other required tests on the clients.”
She shrugged. “I’m a scientist. It didn’t take long before I wanted to see what else I could do with this body program. And there was no way that I was going to tell anyone at the lab about it. Among my many reasons for keeping it to myself is your father. Who knows what he’d do with something like this?”
“I understand,” I said, and I did, even if I no longer could be certain whether the man she referred to was my father or not. “So you obviously found a way to implant this physical impression of the splicing clients’ bodies into someone else.”
“I did.”
“It really is incredible. The similarities couldn’t be any more exact.”
“No, they couldn’t. It’s because this is the exact same information that Lord Dingaling’s mind uses to create the body image he has of himself.”
“It seems as if he could have come up with a more comfortable body if he’s the one creating it.” Dolpheus patted his belly with loud slapping sounds. “I don’t know how people like this do it. I feel like I’m waddling. I have no idea how you would do anything useful in your day like this. I can’t even bend over without straining. And I can’t even see my toes. Or anything else beneath my waist.” He gave me a meaningful glance with those beady eyes. How could men live without being able to see their own dicks? we wondered together.
“Well, what you’ve done is amazing. As long as it’s reversible.” I tried not to worry. Of course Dolpheus wouldn’t have allowed her to do something like this to him if it were permanent. Still, I knew that things rarely turned out as expected, and it would kill me to see this happen to my friend in a permanent fashion. What misery it would be to live in a body such as this when Dolpheus was a true warrior. I tried to laugh away my discomfort; it came out as a half-crazed giggle.
“Lila assured me that it’s fully reversible,” Dolpheus said, fixing her in a stare that communicated that he had every intention of holding her to that promise.
Lila laughed easily. I relaxed a bit. “It’s reversible. Of course it is. It would be a sin to ruin handsomeness like his. I would never do such a thing.” With the rapacious look she was giving Dolpheus, even in the body of this unpleasant little man, I knew that she wouldn’t. “But we had to find a way to get into the palace. He insisted that he had to get in there to save you, even though I thought it was madness. We could think of no other way.”
I nodded my appreciation. As unappealing as it was to look at my friend now, it was brilliant. “He could have gotten past the scanners this way. But what if the real Lord Dingaling were already inside the palace? What then? The guards would see his previous admittance appear on the scanners, and I imagine that most of the courtiers, vultures that they are, are probably circling around inside the palace, waiting for the King and his attacker to die.” I skipped mention that I was the presumed attacker whose head they wanted to see roll.
“We’d planned to page Lord Dingaling and summon him out of the palace. We were about to do that when I felt you calling me. The timing worked out just right.”
“It sounds like it,” I said, grateful that for once things aligned for us.
“I won’t need to be in this body anymore. I can’t wait to get out of it. Lila, you said we could do the conversion wherever we were. You have the samples on you?”
But before Lila could answer, I said, “Not so fast. I think we’ll still have to get into the palace.”
“Unh,” Dolpheus groaned. “Why?”
“Does the effect wear off?” I asked Lila.
“No. It’ll continue until I reverse the procedure.”
“Huh,” I said while Dolpheus asked, “What are you thinking? Why do we need to go into the palace? You just got out of there. Every single guard, save this one,” he offered Kai a glance, “must be looking for you. As of right now, you’re the official murderer of the King.”
“Murderer? Is he dead? I hope he isn’t, because if he is, all my plans just got ruined.”
“He’s still alive,” Kai piped up behind me.
I spun to look at him. It hadn’t occurred to me to cull him of important information that was likely in his possession. “How is his health? What happened?”
“Apparently, a lone assassin broke into the King’s chambers and clobbered him over the head with some kind of blunt weapon, something like a club. The man escaped before he could be caught.”
“Or woman,” Lila added. When all three of us spun to look at her, she said, “What? I’m not saying that it necessarily was a woman, just that you can’t assume it was a man.”
“You’re saying that a woman was dispatched to break through insanely tight security to clobber a king, guarded at all times by his personal force of armed men that are all soldiers proven in battle, over the head by blunt force?” Dolpheus said, mirroring what I was thinking exactly.
“Not necessarily,” she repeated. “But it isn’t wise to underestimate women.”
“Clearly,” I said, and from the lo
ok on Lord Dingaling’s face, now I reflected his sentiments.
“How did he or she get in?” I asked, looking pointedly at Lila even though my question was directed at Kai. Chances of the assassin being a woman were so slim as to be ridiculous. But we had enough problems without risking the offense of a she-dragon, especially one that was beginning to prove her usefulness above and beyond what we’d hoped for.
“And how did the assassin get out?” Dolpheus added.
Kai shrugged. “No one knows.”
“Why do they think it was Tanus?” Dolpheus asked.
“I don’t know. No one seems to know much about what happened or how it could’ve happened when the King was so well protected.” Another shrug of the red-patched shoulders. “The accusation came from Lord Drakos, and we weren’t told what the evidence against Lord Tanus was, just that he was guilty.”
“Convenient enough,” Lila said. “That’s how these people work. They deal in lies, greed, and deceit.”
Speaking of lies and deceit, I thought. “How is it that you aren’t at the fishing cabin where we left you?”
She scrunched her face into a look that said, You guys were idiots for thinking I would stay put like you wanted me to. The fear I pretended to have of the wilds was just a show for you gullible fuckers. Then she said, matter-of-factly, “Because I chose not to be.” I’d underestimated her, even when I thought I wasn’t doing it.
Dolpheus filled in some of the gaps. “When I left you, when you ordered me to, right before the guards captured you, I crossed the bridge out of the palace as fast as I could. I intended on transporting back to the fishing cabin just as soon as I cleared the no-transport zone. But once I cleared it, I almost ran right into Lila. She was about to cross the bridge toward the palace, looking for us.”
“And how did she find us?” I asked Dolpheus, refusing to look at Lila for the time being. I didn’t want to see the smug look I expected to find on her face.
Now Dolpheus shrugged, weak shoulders rising within their fine garb, silks and embroidered damask shimmering in the Suxle Sun that was nearing the horizon once more. How long had it been since I’d slept? I wondered, without caring much as to the answer; it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to stop yet. Dolpheus answered, “We didn’t hide where we were going. And it turns out that Lila can transport.”
“Really?” I said before I thought to restrain myself. I was impressed, and she knew it. So much for the horses we’d borrowed just because of her and that were probably abandoned to dubious fates near the fishing cabin.
“When I told her what was going on with you and that I had to find a way to rescue you, she suggested this disguise.”
“I call it a transformation,” she said. “It’s much more than a disguise.” Clearly.
“And you had all that was necessary for this transformation on your person?” I asked her, eyebrows peaked both in curiosity and suspicion.
“Of course,” she said while pulling out a small box from the front pouch pocket of her lab suit. “I’m a scientist. I like to be prepared.” She snapped open the lid. The three of us, even Kai, approached to peer into her emergency equipment. The box held a series of small vials held fixed in place by elastics and padding. There must have been a hundred of them taking up relatively little physical space.
“What are they all for?” Kai asked, awestruck.
“Well, lots of stuff. This one here,” she pointed, “is the mental image that Lord Dingaling has of his body. It’s what I used for Dolpheus’ transformation.”
“Do you have a piece of someone’s eternality?” I asked at the same time that Dolpheus asked, “Which one will you use to transform me back?”
“I don’t need to use any vial to transform you back to yourself. If you’re able to transport as easily as you can, your mind and will are strong. I’ll be able to guide you back to yourself through the pathways you’ve already built in your mind.” She sounded confident, at least almost confident enough for me to ignore the fact that she purposefully hadn’t answered my question.
“What was the process like to get Dolpheus to transform into this ding-a-ling in the first place?” I asked.
“I extracted a nearly infinitesimal fraction of the mental image that Lord Dingaling has of himself. Dolpheus went to that place of stillness he accesses to transport. Then, I hovered Dingaling’s mental imagery in front of Dolpheus. Once he found it, he had his own personal energy embrace it. And his body morphed to match the mental imagery he brought into his reality.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“How did you hover the mental image in front of him?”
“I released it from its vial at the precise moment that Dolpheus’ mind would be most receptive to the transformation. It floated out in front of him, its energy available for him to interact with.”
“Were you able to recapture Dingaling’s mental imagery? Or is it gone forever?”
“It’s gone. Once I release it, it disappears, merging into the surrounding energy if no one grabs it first.”
For the first time since our unfortunate (and perhaps fortunate) meeting, I looked at Lila with true, deep-seeded wariness. Here was not only a she-dragon, but also one with skills as close to faithum as any human I’d ever seen. Who knew what else she was capable of doing? She’d only explained one of at least a hundred vials. Did she have anything of my father in there? I had the feeling that she did. Everything in her kit looked prohibited.
I would show Lila more respect. Whatever I might think of the personality she’d shown us thus far, she’d earned respect for her skills.
I debated. I considered. And then I decided that was enough of that.
“We need to get into the palace. Can you help us?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Sure. Why do you need to go back into the palace that you just left?”
“Yeah. Why?” Kai asked with boldness I hadn’t expected from him.
“Because I don’t see any other course of action but to do a mind merge with the King. Only this time, I’m going to be looking into his brain.”
“That’s madness,” Dolpheus said, even though he didn’t sound like he was implying that it was a bad idea.
“There’s no way you’ll be able to get to the King,” Kai said, a mixture of awe at the ballsiness of the idea and wariness at the obvious stupidity of it.
“I have to get to the King,” I continued. “Nothing’s gone as we expected it to go. I can’t wait any longer, not with the King on his deathbed. I need to get information out of him now before he takes it with him to his death.”
“I don’t see how we’ll do it,” Dolpheus said. Again, he sounded open to the exploration of my latest madness, as he always was.
Kai stared as if unbelieving that we would attempt to break back into the place he’d labored to get me out of, into the heart of the very nest of the trained beasts ordered to kill me.
Lila, however, was thoughtful. She consulted her kit. Pulled out a vial. Held it up to the sunlight. Gave it a shake. “We don’t need to break into the palace. I have a better option.” Then she smiled with such wonderful mischief that I could have kissed her.
I didn’t. Instead, I thought of what wonderful good fortune had appeared in my life under the guise of its opposite. Life never was as it seemed. Perhaps I’d learned this lesson once and for all and wouldn’t lament what seemed like bad luck in the future. One never knew whether one’s fortunes were good or bad, not until this long life was good and over.
Fourteen
Lila displayed the vial filled with promise, flat across the palm of her outstretched hand. Dolpheus, Kai, and I peered into the black-tinted glass, trying to make out its contents. Because this vial was made of black instead of clear glass, it was evident that Lila valued these scientific tools for their practicality instead of their purity. Coarse, black sand was readily available across the deserts of O. The pure, nearly crystalline sand that was so white and fine th
at it could be fused to create glass so clear that it seemed to vanish into its surroundings could only be found upon the appropriately dubbed Planet Sand, on the other side of the galaxy. The tiny vial Lila held might have cost as much as the income of an entire family for a month, perhaps even two, if it had been made of the sand of luxury. As it was, created with the sand of O, it probably cost less than a roone.
“What is it?” Dolpheus asked.
“Every one of the King’s memories, at least up to about a half year ago.” Lila grinned in triumph. I stared at the mystery vial. Kai stared. Dingaling stared with beady eyes. A silent moment that emphasized Lila’s pride passed until I could secure the cooperation of my mouth to say what I wanted to say.
“How on O did you come by the King’s memories?”
“I told you. I process all the splicing clients and run most of the tests. There are some clients that I make sure to be the one to process.”
“But the King never did any splicing,” I said in the unsure tone of someone who’s had the rug pulled out from him more than once this day already.
She gave an abrupt little laugh. “You really think the king of all of Origins wouldn’t want to get in on immortality? You think he would allow the courtiers to outdo him?”
“Of course I understand that he’d be interested in splicing. But how could he do it? Not when my father—Lord Brachius—controls all of splicing. Not when my father tried to assassinate the entire royal family.”
Lila responded as if I were a four-year-old to whom she had to explain the movement of our two suns and one moon. “You do understand that King Oderon is the most powerful man on all of Planet Origins, right?”