by wildbow
“I see you’ve brought me a present.”
Gordon and I bent low into a bow. “Lord Infante. It is good to see you again.”
Setting the stage as best as we could. We were caught in a river. All we could do now was steer as best as we could, and hope we wouldn’t be dashed on the rocks.
“A fugitive,” Monte said.
“I’m well aware of who he is. Sylvester Lambsbridge. One of the Lambs of Radham. Francis, you were intimately familiar with this one, were you not?”
Not good. We saw Monte shoot us a sidelong glance. The lack of familiarity was telling. The first rock, and very easily the one that might sink us.
Gordon and I watched the Duke’s eye move. There was a delay. As if it took willful effort to direct his eye, to fixate on us. Whether there was recognition or a complete mental blank, the man gave no indication.
“A pity you’re not up to talking,” the Infante spoke. “Your counsel would have been appreciated.”
A heavy hand settled on the Duke’s shoulder.
“You may leave,” the Infante said.
“I wish that meant us,” Lara said, from the sidelines. She stood near Lillian, who was leaning against a tree, arms folded, cross, her back to me.
“Lord Infante,” Monte said, not budging from where he stood. “Sylvester Lambsbridge told us that he was doing work for you. That we were to bring him to you.”
“Is that so?” the Infante asked.
Monte bowed deeper, then took his leave, joined by Moth and the others.
It left the Duke, the Infante, and the Falconer in the garden with Shirley and I.
“A shame about Jeremy,” the Infante said, as if he were speaking to the Duke. “But I do like Montgomery. Nascent promise, there.”
The Duke, striving to put in effort, moved his eye, looking up in the general direction of the Infante.
“I see a lot of the Baron Richmond in him, as a matter of fact,” the Infante said.
“What?” Gordon asked. My lips remained closed.
The Infante set his eyes on me. “Richmond was clever, once upon a time. He could have climbed a fair way up the ladder, done more with himself, and done more for the Crown. But he learned the wrong lessons along the way. Tragic, but all too common. His death at your hands was just.”
Gordon and I bowed deeper, acknowledging the statement.
“Montgomery could go either way,” the Infante said. “Straighten up. Look at me.”
We did.
“You lied to them, telling them you worked for me.”
“I did,” Gordon and I said.
“You have your audience. Will I now find out that your companion there is plague infected?”
“No, my lord,” we said. Have to take the subject off of Shirley. “My understanding of you is that you appreciate strong, bold, meaningful strokes of the brush. Cornered, my first thought was that, instead of dying, I could make myself useful to you.”
“Had you phrased that as being useful to me again, I might have had you killed,” the Infante said.
Easy enough to see what he was thinking about. “With all due respect, Lord Infante, I took the death of the Baron Richmond to be a neutral thing. As much good done as bad.”
“The bad, unfortunately, being ours to bear,” the Infante placed his other hand on the Duke’s other shoulder as he said that, standing behind the man in the chair. He made the Duke look small.
“The act of killing the Baron was the nail in the coffin, my last act as a Lamb. I was cornered by a former ally, I had to shoot—”
“Mary Cobourn. In one knee,” the Infante finished for me. “I’m well aware. Faced with a strange boy with high aspirations and two dead noble ladies already killed by his hand, I sought to inform myself. I asked after you, and I obtained my answers.”
“Yes, Lord Infante,” Gordon and I said. We bowed, acknowledging him.
“I’ve remained aware of you as you cut a violent and explosive swathe through Tynewear. I read your records and I put good minds to work on analyzing data, about Wyvern and similar drugs, to project forward and to reach conclusions that your doctors wouldn’t have found until five years after you expired.”
The Falconer was watching. Very quiet. Her eyes matched the Infante’s. Dark, penetrating, and suggestive of something very clever going on beneath the surface.
The Infante continued, “When word of you being on a train heading south from Tynewear reached my ears, I had investigators track down people who were on that same train. We traced things backward, in the midst of some of the greatest chaos this continent has ever seen outside of wartime.”
Gordon and I remained silent.
“I could make threats, but what good is a threat? You’ve lived with Wyvern’s venomed stinger for all your life, promising pain today and lost sanity before you’re twenty-one. I could threaten the life of Shirley Pope, hold her hostage, but you grew up with your fellow Lambs and you knew you would likely live to see them die. They’ve been hostages all your life, and they remain hostages now. You lost your childhood friend and brother Gordon to one pull of the trigger. Jamie, another childhood friend and brother, lost to oblivion after a throw of the switch. Threatening you and holding things you love hostage is old hat for you. Those things have permeated every day of your existence for a long time now.”
Jamie loomed in my peripheral vision, to my left. Gordon loomed in my right.
I wanted to say something, and I couldn’t. I wanted Gordon and I to say something, and he wasn’t volunteering anything.
“You left them behind,” he said. “All of the rest of the Lambs. One by one, you’ll hear stories. Your Mary Cobourn already has notes in her file. Fatty deposits under her skin, in the armpit, behind one ear. Moles. In a year and a half, they will be noticeable. Within six months of that point, she’ll be slowed or crippled by it. In three years, she’ll be dead.”
I looked over in Mary’s direction, then wished I hadn’t. My mind jumped straight to trying to paint her with the Infante’s brush, complete with lumps and blemishes, and in the effort to erase that part of the image, I blurred the picture and lost the clarity in her.
“Duncan reported to Professor Hayle early on that your Helen was becoming emotionally disturbed. I’ve had other sources say that Ibbot is neglecting her as a project. He invests too much energy into the political side of things, when his talent is solely limited to the art of biology. She’ll soon reach a point where she requires more upkeep than he is willing to provide while he is so eager to seize greater opportunities, and the idea of a custom wife, pillow companion and personal weapon that he grew in a vat will lose out in the end.”
I didn’t look at Helen. I didn’t want that image to be blurry like Mary’s had.
But the Infante kept talking on the subject. “She will go to his lab for a standard appointment, bubbly, smiling and laughing. That preferred personality is in her records. She’ll be nonetheless obedient as he asks her to lay down across the counter and opens her up to examine her organs. And I can assure you, that spiteful, vitriolic little man will be in the midst of palpating her insides with a scalpel lying within arm’s reach, and he will find his way to the decision that frees him to pursue his politics. That is, if she doesn’t break before then, slip up, and lead him to the conclusion herself. Whatever the case, he will make a single small cut, deep inside her, and she will go quiet and cold.”
Shirley shot me a nervous glance. I remained very still.
“You’ve condemned yourself to a very lonely existence, Sylvester Lambsbridge,” he said. “You’ve put considerable distance between yourself and the people you love to avoid having to see them go. But word of their passing will find you, no matter where you hide, and you will, with your last vestiges of sanity, wish you had been there.”
He released the Duke’s shoulders, and he approached me.
I didn’t move as he placed his hands across my cheeks, cupping my head in his hands.
“What do I
do with you, child?” he asked. “I have all the resources in the Crown States at my disposal, and you’ve confounded me. How do I invent you a punishment fit for hell when you seem so intent on flinging yourself there first?”
He knelt before me, and the weight of him made the thick black stones under my feet shift slightly, crunching with a stone against stone sound.
He embraced me. Even kneeling, he was far taller than me, but he hugged me to his prodigious stomach.
“Wretched child,” he said.
I looked up at Shirley.
Gordon, Jamie, and Helen didn’t volunteer anything. The other Lambs were unreachable, indistinct, or too far away for their individual reasons.
There were ways to salvage them. I could work my head around it. Dig for them if I really wanted them. But to do that, I had to acknowledge that they were as fragile as they were. That they were smoke.
I was legitimately afraid at how easily it had crumbled.
I hadn’t anticipated the Infante doing this. I’d expected a challenge.
A challenge, I could rise to.
This wasn’t a challenge. This was the epitome of what I’d hated, in the very earliest days, with Lacey and the other doctors.
Acknowledgement of my reality.
“Do you want something to occupy yourself with?” the Infante asked.
“Yes,” I spoke, finding a voice. Belated, we added, “Lord Infante.”
“Then find and kill Mauer for me. He’s in the city.”
“As you wish,” we said.
The Infante released us from the hold. He gave us a measured look. “Then take your companion with you. I have no need for hostages, I have no need for threats. I’ll give you a general direction, pointed away from me, and we’ll see if you do more damage to the other side than to mine.”
“If I may make a request?” we asked.
“I’d thought I was being generous enough, but you may. My resources are at your disposal, should you want them. I certainly have enough.”
“I’d like access to a lab,” Evette and I said.
Previous Next
Thicker than Water—14.6
The cell was dark, dry, and spacious, with very nice furniture, all considered. There was a desk and chair that would be fit for any of the more respected businessmen or politicians in Radham, a modest bed with nicer sheets than I’d ever had, a stocked bookshelf, and some basic lab equipment.
My hands moved through practiced motions, putting together smoke canisters. We only had the materials for three, pieced together from canisters that were intended to be thrown at fires to extinguish them and from basic chemicals in the kits.
We only worked with the basics anyhow. No education to draw from, only what Marv and Jamie had been able to impart, with a little bit of ingenuity and problem solving.
Problem solving could get us 90% of the way there. The trick, it seemed, came down to either luck or having the right resources to tap.
We were in a very interesting place when it came to resources.
“Smoke bombs, smoke bombs,” Evette and I said. “Smoke bomb with nerve poison, smoke bomb that suffocates, smoke bomb that nauseates, smoke bomb that suffocates, again…”
Pause. Wait, listen.
We smiled, setting the four bombs in a line on the desk.
We reached out, and set one of the tall glass cylinders to spinning precariously on its end before snatching up a piece of paper.
“To… do,” we said, penning down the words. “Get Mauer. Capture. Have a chat. Kill or deliver him—”
We reached out and stopped the wobbling canister from toppling over and falling to the floor in the process.
“See how much damage we can do to our enemies and to ourselves in the process. Wouldn’t be Sylvester if we didn’t get him hurt in the process, am I right?”
Only silence answered.
Wyvern had originally been intended to help with learning language and other things that were so frequently shaped in childhood and then ‘locked in’. Academy students were often pushed by their families from a young age to learn their ratios and study texts, attend tutoring, enroll in academy prep schools, attend summer classes, and to treat every experience as a learning experience, without a spare moment to play or to draw. They often reached the point where they could do the work, they could study well, but with all their prior experience, they hadn’t been equipped to have an original thought or idea.
When those students stumbled, if they’d curried enough favor, then that little green syringe would be dangled in front of their noses, with the promise that it would hurt more than anything the student had ever experienced, and it might give them the ability to cross the hurdle in front of them and revive parts of the brain that had atrophied in childhood.
We knew there was another use that had come up before. Compulsive behaviors, habits, and surgeon’s jag, when those actions that someone performed a thousand times a day coupled with pressure to introduce a crippling compulsive twitch or jerk to the precise actions. Wyvern could soften the brain to allow the person to work out the mental wrinkles and knots.
But it was a double edged sword. Things that had worked before could so easily slide into that same domain. Tics, new habits, forming deep grooves with very mundane actions or roles that were only temporary. For most, it was one small dose to correct the major issue, then two or three doses more to steer back onto course, with the subject learning how to direct things and being very, very careful.
Or, in cases like mine, the doses were ongoing for long periods of time, and the risk of the wrong things crystallizing in a bad way was minimal.
Minimal wasn’t ‘nonexistent’, however. And Evette and I had no idea if I was that much more susceptible to problems in this less stable state.
“Food,” we noted, penning it down. “Still haven’t eaten. Need food.”
We snuck a glance at Helen, who was in the corner.
She was Helen in the same way that a towel was a towel when it was soaking wet and wrung tight into a coil. There was hair on the head and there was skin and a long neck and a pretty dress, there were arms and there were legs, and they were all roughly in the right positions, but even though the figure stood still, things were twisted and stretched as if she was mid-movement, everything turned around and wrinkled in action and bent straight. Abstract, the distillation of the individual puzzle pieces that put a physical Helen together as a dream might provide in the midst of a flurry of chaotic events and impressions.
But the prison cell was quiet, the flurry had stopped.
Our Helen, silent and completely without a face.
We couldn’t let this crystallize. We couldn’t fuss, let ourselves get upset, or give this moment any emotional resonance. That would make it more likely to stay this way.
“Sugar. Brain food. Cake,” we spoke aloud, penning it down.
The hope that we might be able to snap our imaginary Helen back into being was dashed when the image didn’t respond to the prompt.
We couldn’t let ourselves be disappointed. Disappointment could be an emotional connection, something that tied this impression of Helen to our emotions. We had to control how we thought and felt, to avoid this broken image tainting the deep-set impressions of the Helen we knew.
The trick was to keep moving, and not dwell too long on any one point.
“We’ll need information. Two ways we can go about that. We’ll probably need to go after his people, see if we can’t trace them back to him. We’ll need to get the shape of his approach. What he’s doing, the moves he’s making, what his group structure looks like, the resources he has, the direction he’s thinking…”
“How we position in respect to that,” Gordon said.
“Yes!” Evette said. Her glee mirrored my own relief that this was sort of working.
“And how we position in respect to that,” Evette and I said, noting it down on the paper. The scrawled letters joined the other points that were scattered around t
he page, including a large, angular shape, labeled ‘the shape of his approach’.
I looked up at Gordon.
Gordon, in response, only stood there. He wasn’t all twisted up and wrinkled into ambiguity like Helen was, but the spectre lacked a face. There was only an irregular expanse of skin.
Nope! Not about to dwell on that. Couldn’t let myself worry about what happened if I lost that face in my head forever. Were there even pictures of Gordon anywhere, to let me remind myself? In Lambsbridge, perhaps, but that was a tricky place to get into. A hell of a task. In Radham Academy, in his files, perhaps.
I huffed out something that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in the moment. Radham academy, easy peasy place to go, if we needed a reminder.
“Focusing on the task at hand—” Evette started.
Yes. The task at hand.
“Mauer. We like Mauer,” she said. “He’s fascinating, and he probably enjoys the brilliant moments where it all comes together just as much as we do. We’ve run into him before, we know he likes the slow burn, setting everything up, then the flare.”
My hand shook as we brought the pen closer to the page. We wrestled for a moment, working to try to get it steady enough to write something proper.
Giving up, we embraced the messiness, drew exaggerated, sketchy circles around ‘resources’ on the paper. Then added notes. Time, materials, people.
Multiple sketchy circles around time, then, leading to ‘moves’.
Together, we diagrammed it out, dipping the pen into the inkwell a few times to make some bolder, sloppier lines where needed.
It was likely indecipherable to anyone but us, but it was, on paper, the ‘shape’ of the problem.
“That scrawling,” Jamie’s voice came out of nowhere, “is not a good sign, Sy. It’s worrisome.”
“Genius usually is, to a mere layperson,” Evette and I said.
“A mere layperson. You two are lucky I’m a ghost, Sy, because I’d normally punch you in the shoulder for that.”
Evette and I grinned.