by Lucia Ashta
I wasn’t interested in better understanding the motives for her betrayal, or for his. I wanted never to see either one of them again once I got out of this blasted inferno.
Despite my will, I found myself moving the signaling disk to my palm. Still leaned forward in the chair, another scene from Ilara’s life sprang forth, like faithum, for my dissection and torture.
It was the night of the Queen’s assassination. Ilara would have just come from making love with me, although now I knew there was no love in it for her, the best actress across all of Origins. She exited the tunnel network into the hall down and across from her chambers. I only vaguely registered that she’d known about the tunnel system after all. Just another secret she didn’t deem necessary to share with me, her latest mark.
She didn’t make it to the door to her chambers before chaos exploded all at once around her. A guard had spotted her and raised the alarm that brought a handful of loyal servants and, finally, the King running. From the look on the King’s face, I would have thought it was fright that he’d almost lost a daughter he loved more than life itself. Now, I wondered if it were the loss of a valuable spy and weapon that caused his distress.
“Ilara,” he said, rushing toward her, “You must come with me right now.”
“What happ—”
“There’s no time for that now. Later. We have to get you out of here. Right this second.” He was in his night robe, a luxurious weaving of silk and embroidery. He draped a flowing sleeve around her shoulder and ushered her down the hall, away from her chambers.
“Magnus,” he called over his shoulder. An elderly man I’d seen at the palace many times, always in the King’s shadow, stepped forward, a fine example of dignity and decorum, no matter the circumstances.
The King, with Ilara in tow, stopped in front of a door. Magnus stepped forward to swing it open. “My Liege,” he said and bowed. Magnus was of the old school of thought that there’s no excuse for lack of etiquette. “Everyone, leave us,” the monarch called. “Drakos, you know what to do. Magnus, join me.”
The King led Ilara into the chamber that adjoined hers, and Magnus closed the door. The image before me sputtered to a fast death, and I found myself riffling through the folder looking for its continuation.
The disk I was looking for wasn’t in the first folder nor the second. But it was in the third. Once I opened the final folder, I found the disk right away. It nearly jumped out at me. I placed this disk in the palm of my hand and leaned even farther into the story. I couldn’t afford to miss a thing.
Right away, I found myself back in the chamber. The King was seated on a plump double armchair with Ilara next to him, where he half held, half gripped her hand in such a way that it wasn’t obvious whether she was free to leave if she chose.
“Magnus, you’re to take Ilara into Lord Brachius’ splicing facility and transport her away from here.”
It was difficult to tell which of them was more surprised. Both the dignified servant and daughter were wide eyed with fright and astonishment, but Magnus alone knew better than to question his master.
“What are you talking about, Father? I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are. You will go where I tell you, and you’ll go tonight. Before the Auxle Sun sets tonight, I want you gone from this world.”
If I hadn’t been staring right at her, I wouldn’t have believed it. A tear welled at the corner of one eye. It never fell to mar that perfect visage, but it held, revealing to me that perhaps she was a victim of betrayal as much as I was.
“Magnus, you can break into the facility, yes?”
“I believe so, my Liege.”
“You’ll have to be extremely careful. No one, absolutely no one, can know what you’ve done.”
“Yes, my King. I will do my best.”
“You’ll have to do better than that. You’ll need to hack into the splicing system, of which we have no idea as to its operation, and transport the Princess away from the planet. Lord Brachius should be sufficiently distracted by his assassination team in the palace here to be focused on the integrity of his splicing facility.”
“Forgive me, my Liege, but would it not be easier to break into the off planet transport system of the sand industry to effectuate what you ask?” Magnus bowed in submission to ensure the King realized that he wasn’t questioning his wisdom.
There was a pause long enough for me to fear for the servant, but the King wasn’t bothered. “I wish we could do that, Magnus. But no,” the silver head was moving side to side, “it isn’t secure enough. There are too many people involved in the off planet travel of the sand industry. It would be too easily discovered, and if you aren’t discovered, then your tracks could be. No, it must be Lord Brachius’ place. His extreme secrecy and security will serve us in this situation. No one will expect it, not even him. He thinks the Princess dead, and I’ll make sure that he believes it. Besides, I imagine that the splicing industry possesses much more advanced technology than the sand industry’s that has become outdated.”
The King looked at Ilara, just once, before continuing. “It must be this way.”
“But… why?” she asked.
“Because someone, Lord Brachius I presume, has just killed your mother and tried to kill you. The only way to ensure your safety is to allow you to be believed dead and get you off planet until I can once more secure the reign of the Andaron line.”
Ilara didn’t recoil at the mention of her mother’s death. Only someone who knew her as well as I would have been able to spot the devastation that tore through that perfectly composed facade.
“It’s your birthright that I aim to protect, Ilara. I’ll bring you back once it’s safe for you to rejoin me.”
Something died in Ilara then as concretely as her mother’s body grew cold at the other end of the palace. She stared straight ahead, an unsettled calm in those cosmic eyes. It was the calm before the storm. “And where will I be going?”
The King looked to his manservant. “Magnus, you will send the Princess to Planet Sand. While she’s there, she can gather information to aid us in extracting the pure sand from the planet more efficiently.”
Magnus bowed again, reverently. “Yes, my Liege. It will be done as you command.”
Finally, the King turned to his daughter. He seemed to take her in for the first time that night. “It won’t be bad for you. You’ll remember everything. You’ll remain the same person, just away from here, safe, until you can return.”
“Safe,” she repeated, with no emotion to betray the steadiness of her voice. “Yet an incalculable distance away from the home I love. From the one I love…”
In that one incomplete thought, I allowed myself to hope that she spoke of me, that I was the one she loved. I was, after all, the one she’d just come from making love to. The culmination of my love for her dripped down the interior walls of her body, originating deep inside her, where she claimed she cherished my liquid energy.
“You can’t tell anyone what’s about to happen. You can’t reach out to anyone, Ilara. No one can know, or we risk everything.” The King’s admonishment was stern.
“We risk everything?” She laughed a chuckle so devoid of real joy that a shudder ran through my body, even though this was a memory of something that had occurred years before.
“We risk everything,” the King said, a domineering note alive in his voice. “You won’t whisper a word of this to anyone, not even to Lord Brachius’ son, who should mean nothing to you, anyway. He was a means to an end. Nothing more. You are a princess, not a whore. You will rise above your circumstances and leave behind perilous emotions. Emotions are the province of the infirm, the stupid, and the masses.”
Ilara said nothing. She simply rose from her seat and walked toward the door. There she waited, her back to the King.
Magnus bowed deeply to a monarch that had just insulted him and nearly everyone else he knew and cared for, but he’d learned to exclude emotion from his life l
ong ago. It was the only way to hold loyalty to the Crown, which he wanted to feel and truly did. Magnus was one of the King’s most loyal subjects. This loyalty would cost him his life, but was given freely, a worthy sacrifice from someone so far beneath royalty.
When Magnus stepped ahead of Ilara to open the door for her, she stepped through it without a single glance, not even a regretful one, back at her father. She left the King sitting, deep in thought, with her head held high and her eyes clear save for the one lone tear that hadn’t yet fallen.
Finally, I knew. Ilara was on Planet Sand, far, far away.
Twenty-Four
I possessed the information I’d entered the King’s memories to retrieve, and now I couldn’t be free of them fast enough. Desperation arrived swiftly, a heavy club to the head. I could think of nothing but escaping this den of torment.
However, I didn’t know how to go about getting out of there. There were no obvious exits. I was all alone in a room with no windows or doors, just four walls that closed in on me more with each passing moment.
My skin began to itch all over without apparent cause. Suddenly, I couldn’t remain still. I stood to pace the small room, skirting the edges of its four oppressive walls, dodging furniture. I felt as if I would jump out of my skin at any moment; perhaps I would scratch away the layer of skin that kept me in this container so that I could finally be free of this suffering.
How could I get out of here? My eyes bugged and my mind seized at the sensation of being trapped, making thought even more difficult.
I couldn’t breathe. I yanked at my shirt, trying to alleviate the tightness that weighed on my chest. I started coughing, then gasping, for air.
Determined not to die such a pointless, humiliating death, I pounded on the walls. Next, with a running start, I smashed my shoulder into the wall, but the wall didn’t even shake at the impact.
I bent over at the waist, heaving. Was I really to die this way? Clawing for breath in the old memories of a despicable despot?
I gasped another time and heard the sound of death rattle out of me. But then the incongruous happened (as had been the way since I first entered this nightmare). A terrible laughter ripped through me, moving aside whatever obstruction within my lungs or my mind had prevented me from breathing.
Abruptly, I could breathe again. Still, my problems were far from over. Insanity, all batting eyelashes and long legs in a too-short skirt, flirted with my mind, an easy target. I cackled raucously at the thought that madness might claim me as easily as Ilara had. I’d been easy prey for the seductress. I’d fallen in love with her far before I could tell her, fearing she would think me a foolish adolescent who didn’t realize that love often came and went, even when it seemed impossible that it could do so.
I ran around the four walls in circles, like the madman I was on the verge of becoming. Was there any tangible reason for this sudden claim insanity had on me? No, not really. Still, it was coming on, like a rash I wasn’t supposed to scratch, and so I itched all the more.
I moved to the center of the floor, where the scattered disks were no longer. They’d disappeared at some point since craziness began courting me. Now there was a big open spot on the floor, big enough for a man my size.
I collapsed into it. I curled into a ball, making myself as small as I possibly could, which was nowhere near small enough. I thought I would cry, that I would dissolve into another pathetic heap of emotion, but I didn’t. Instead of sorrow, what surged within me was so much more fierce—perhaps also so much worse. A burning, furious rage formed so quickly that it left me stunned, bewildered at how little control I had over myself, over my life. I’d spent a lifetime learning to control myself. What had been the point in all of it? What was the point in this? What was the point in anything?
I feared I might never again find meaning in life. There were some betrayals that cut too deep and revealed too much about self and humanity for it to be worthwhile to continue in the same way as one had before.
The rage continued to burn. My despair had done nothing but fuel it. It burned wildly, out of control. I couldn’t stand it. I needed to release it, without any idea how. I was unprepared for this sudden madness that overtook me as feverishly as the most virulent of infectious diseases.
But then, I didn’t think. I just did. And what came out of me was frightening.
I screamed a blood-curdling scream. Had I just witnessed a blazing demon tear a human limb from limb, my reaction might not have been as bad as this. If a human heart made a sound when it broke in a way that could never be repaired, I imagined that it would be something like this—because what could be worse?
I drew a shaky breath in preparation for another shriek, feeling tears on its tail, barreling in like a tsunami. I understood that I was crumbling into pieces. Perhaps an observer, had there been one, could have inferred some deep truth about the creation point of life, or its end, in watching this fast-paced destruction of a life force that no one truly comprehended, only claimed to.
Then, suddenly and violently, I was torn from this nightmarish dream world I was in. I fractured a bit more as I was pulled from the King’s memories. But what was a little more breaking when one was already smashed to pieces? Nothing. It was nothing at all. That’s what I was, I thought, in the one final reflection of torment that the King’s memories would give birth to.
I found myself blinking up into Lila’s face. She was an unlikely angel of mercy. Yet she’d saved me when I desperately needed saving from no one but myself. “Are you all right, Tanus?” she was asking. I registered her words in a distant part of my brain that could still function in the world she inhabited.
I moved my head from side to side, searching for visual cues that might push away my sense of disorientation. “Don’t move,” she warned. But it was too late. I’d already seen Dolpheus and Kai’s faces, hovering above Lila’s, concern etched across their features, along with random splatters of blood.
“Stay still, Tanus,” Lila went on. “You’re probably feeling disoriented and dizzy. It will pass if you don’t move while you reorient yourself to this reality. You’ll begin to feel normal again soon enough.”
I didn’t attach much hope to her words. The chances of achieving what I would have previously considered normalcy were slim. The chasm that drove down the middle of my body, rending me in two, remained. It ached as if my body had broken physically, the pain of a thousand broken bones.
“Are you okay, Tan?” Dolpheus said behind her. “You were screaming.”
I moved my head to one side, and the ground tilted with me. I brought my head back to center in a hurry and waited for the rush to pass. But I was staring straight into Dolpheus’ concern. I closed my eyes to shut him out. It was my only defense, and a poor one, against a betrayer.
“Will he be all right? Why was he screaming?” Dolpheus was asking Lila.
“He’ll be okay. It just might take awhile. He was gone for a long time and going into memories that aren’t your own can be traumatic. The pathways in everyone’s brains are different. It can be disorienting to be within the construct of another person’s mind. Who knows what he experienced in the King’s memories? He might have lost his entire framework of reality. He might be having to discover it all over again.”
“And you didn’t think it appropriate to warn us of this before he did the mind merge?” There was an obvious edge to Dolpheus’ voice; it was sharp enough to cut through mowab shit.
“Would it have mattered? He was determined to find the Princess’ location. I don’t think anything would have kept him from it.”
“Maybe not, but he should have known. It would’ve mattered. It would’ve mattered to me.”
“What is it between you two? Are you lovers? Do you enjoy a roll between the covers, you two? Is that why neither one of you have ever settled down with a woman? Because you love each other, your little secret?”
There was a long, agitated silence in which I imagined, even in my confused
state, that Dolpheus was debating whether to kill her right there on the spot. When he finally did answer, the tone of his voice was enough to scare any normal person; Lila, however, wasn’t normal. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. And if you ever say anything like that again to me, or to him, I’ll cut your tongue out.” If Lila didn’t believe he meant it, she was a fool that deserved to have her tongue carved out.
Under ordinary circumstances, the prolonged silence that drew out would have been enough to rouse me from myself to witness the death stares these two must have been sharing. But I didn’t want to look at either one of them ever again.
Finally, Kai broke the tension with a thoughtful, gentle comment. “I envy the friendship you share with him, Dolpheus. I’ve never had a friend that I could count on. I’ve never known true loyalty past that of my mother.”
I heard a clapping sound, probably Dolpheus’ hand against Kai’s back. “Perhaps you’ll someday learn to trust us. You fought bravely today. You protected Tanus in one of the few moments when he was vulnerable and needed protection.”
Unintentionally, I moaned. I ached all over without a single visible injury. I didn’t want to, but I opened my eyes again, anyway. My eyes teared at the sudden brightness of the Auxle Sun, still a palm’s length away from the horizon. I drew up onto one elbow, and Lila and Dolpheus shot a hand out to support me. I let them help me only because I had to. They brought me to sitting where I leaned into Dolpheus’ hand, strong and solid.
Lila studied me with the dispassionate interest of a scientist, registering observations, never resting on one point for long. Then “Are. You. All. Right?” she asked, as if I were feebleminded. It was appropriate, I thought, with all the mirth I could manage.
No, I’m not all right. Not at all. “Yes. I’m fine,” I said, despite my thoughts. I tried to stand. She put a hand to my chest. “No.” She shook her head. “Not yet. Let your mind adjust back to its way of interpreting your reality. I had to pull you out of the mind merge abruptly when you started screaming. There was none of the usual easing you out of the memories before suggesting that you return to your own. The abruptness of the transition will make your recovery slower. So take it easy.”