Thaddeus was leaning forward, all slackness of sleep and intoxication gone from his expression. “Fascinating.”
“So now I have to ask you, Thad, why might I need to murder you?”
He only blinked. “But you don’t lov—”
“Don’t,” she interrupted firmly, “make stupid observations or I will have Holokai jam a few shark’s teeth into your ass.”
He looked confused. “But after that, ahem, trouble with that other woman—”
“Three other women.”
“Three other women, you couldn’t lov—”
“Holokai.” She gestured. “His ass and the shark’s teeth, if you would be so kind.”
“No, no, wait!” Thaddeus blurted. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Yes, well … I am sorry about that. Truly contrite.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said in a voice that communicated just how much she doubted it. “However, you haven’t answered the question. Why might I need to kill you in just a few hours?”
“Other than the three other women?”
“Wanting to kill you, Thad, and needing to kill you are different things. Why might I need to kill you?”
He blinked. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Neither can I.” Leandra sighed. “Which is too bad, because if I have to kill anyone on my list of possible victims, I would choose you.”
“What happens if you just run away from the city?”
“The prophecy assures me that everyone I know and love will die. So I can’t just run or hide or smoke enough opium to fog my brain into oblivion.”
“I see,” he was absently biting his thumbnail, as he often did when thinking.
“It is too bad I can’t stop myself from loving.”
“I’ll say it is. That would solve everything.”
“It is too bad that you can’t cast a spell on my mind that would stop me from loving.”
“You mean like that time I tried to write a spell that could stop someone from feeling hatred? The one we talked about—” He looked at her. “Oh.”
“So we come to the second reason for my little visit,” she said. “Do you still have the drafts?”
He looked past her to the bookshelves. “Somewhere. But I never got past casting it on monkeys and then dunking them in water.”
“It wasn’t your most compassionate moment, but if I remember, none of the monkeys died.”
“No and they didn’t bite me afterward either. But, you can’t mean you want me to…”
“I want you to.”
A sudden wide smile broke across his handsome face. “No one’s ever done anything like that before.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Ever?”
“Two famous linguists have written about the theory behind such a text. The first was Magister Agwu Shannon, your father’s former teacher. And the second was Magister Lotannu Akomma, your aunt’s confidant and the current Dean of Astrophell. I met him when I was training at Astrophell, you know.”
Leandra frowned as an idea tickled her brain. Something about the name bothered her. “What does Akomma look like?”
“Tall, very dark skin, long dreadlocks going to gray. Doesn’t talk much. Well, doesn’t talk much for an academic. Why?”
Leandra shook her head. “Never mind. You were saying?”
“Maybe Lotannu Akomma could write a spell that could stop someone from loving, or someone like him, but I couldn’t. I’m…” He gestured to the opium paraphernalia now scattered on the floor. “I’m me.”
“It is quite the handicap,” she said. “But I want your best effort and I want it tonight.”
“But—”
“You owe me,” she said in a voice suddenly low and vicious.
Thaddeus held still for a moment but then nodded. “All right, tonight I’ll try to stop you from being able to love.”
“You tried to do that to me years ago without magic and failed.” Leandra stood. “So this time, you’d better succeed.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Belowdecks, Nicodemus stepped into the cabin and found the pyromancer asleep in her hammock. Sir Claude had bound her ankles and wrists with metal. Doria had bandaged her amputated right palm.
Nicodemus sat on a stool and pulled a brown vial from his belt purse. In his other hand, he held a small cloth bundle he hoped he would not have to unwrap.
The years had given him occasion to interrogate prisoners. At times he had been harsh, even cruel, but never yet a torturer—not because he was a good man, but because he was a lucky one. There had always been alternative methods of motivating prisoners. Maybe one day his luck would wear out. Maybe that day was today.
Nicodemus looked up from the brown vial and saw that the pyromancer had opened her eyes and was studying him. Though her expression was neutral, the tension around her mouth betrayed her pain. She hid it well.
“You know who I am?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Magistra Doria Kokalas has explained about your hand? We cut out the canker curse in time to save your life. You understand about my touch and the canker curse?”
Again, a nod.
“I told Magistra to withhold pain medication until after we talked. I need clearheaded answers. So I propose a trade.” He held up the brown vial. “The alcoholic tincture of opium.”
The pyromancer’s eyes fixed on the vial.
“My wife tells me that physicians who fail to give the proper pain medication after surgery are guilty of torture.”
“How convenient for you,” the pyromancer said between stiff lips.
“It’s good that you have a quick wit. This will go faster. So then, perhaps you can start by telling me your name.”
She only glared at him.
Nicodemus looked at the brown vile. “It is a bit of a strange thought, to torture by withholding. Say the word ‘torture’ and the mind jumps to the clichés—thumbscrews, hot irons, that sort of thing. But if you think about it, this leaves fewer scars, less mess on the floor. It’s perfectly justifiable until you’ve given clear answers.”
“Whatever your justification, you know it’s monstrous,” the pyromancer blurted. “You know you, your wife, and the league are all monsters. Your intermingling of humanity and divinity is an abomination to the Creator.”
“So we get down to business. We in the league worship the Creator as well, you know.”
“You place your petty gods before the Creator.”
“That’s the new teaching in the empire? Your rivals are inhuman, so it’s permissible or maybe even necessary to destroy them? Hardly original thinking. But then what—other than something monstrous—is original?”
“You’ll not get another word from me.”
“Not even your name?”
She looked away.
The barge rocked and set her hammock swaying. “Torture by withholding,” Nicodemus said slowly. “Maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising; after all, what is more painful than kindness or love withheld? What’s more harmful than a lie by omission?”
She said nothing.
“Very well, perhaps not your name. But perhaps you can tell me why imperial spellwrights are brutalizing small villages on the Bay of Standing Islands? Why kill all those innocent villagers?”
Her face twisted with hatred. “We d-din’t—” she stuttered in rage but then pursed her lips.
“Go on.”
She closed her eyes.
“Let me guess: You were ordered not to talk if you were captured.”
“Ordered not to be captured,” she growled. “It was only because that bitch cast that hydromancer spell on me and I was confused. If I had been clearheaded, I wouldn’t have attacked you. I would have cut my own throat.”
“That’s your preferred method? Is that why you drove the villagers into a madness in which they did the same?”
“We didn’t cause that madness.”
“You really shouldn’t tease me like this. We’ve only an hour more until we reac
h Chandralu.” He paused to consider the vial. “You will be taken, under guard of course, to the infirmary. Magistra Kokalas explained to me that amputations are more complicated than one might think. Taking off a limb is not so simple as sawing off a heel of bread. They will have to revise our crude field operation, take out some of the bones and meat in your palm so that there will be enough slack in the skin so they can sew the skin together. Does that make sense?”
She didn’t move or speak.
“I would like to tell them that you have been cooperative and to be generous with the pain medication. I would hate to say that you have yet to explain the imperial presence in Ixos and that therefore they would have to use … what was it Doria said … the minimum necessary anesthetic, I believe.”
The pyromancer was pressing her lips together so tightly they blanched.
Nicodemus sighed. “Talking to you like this … It makes me think back to when I was a disabled boy—always afraid of others, of punishment, of powerlessness. Sometimes I wonder how I became so ruthless. Sometimes I wonder if I could have been anything but ruthless. Sometimes I wish I could go back to being that disabled boy again. He would have pitied you. But being who I am now and knowing the part you played in brutalizing the village of Feather Island, I don’t feel much pity.”
“You should have been permanently censored as a child, like all the cacographic children,” she snarled. “That would have stopped you from worshiping misspelling and error and the unholy union of human and divine language. You turned your back on the Creator.”
“Your sincerity is impressive,” Nicodemus said. “Having spent the last thirty years proselytizing neodemons into gods and goddesses, I can appreciate what you are attempting.”
“You know in your heart that you and the league are idolaters. You should be teaching the people to worship the Creator and to be thinking for themselves, rather than cowering before your idols.”
Nicodemus nodded. “I had heard that there was a new age dawning in the empire. My half-sister’s metaspells making language more logical have enabled new wonders. I read a report about the cannons of Trillinon. If it’s true, it is most impressive. But now you are telling me that along with your great learning and achievements you are developing the madness of war? That your young authors hope to destroy our kingdoms; when in fact, both league and empire should come together so that we might survive the Disjunction?”
She laughed. “There are some that say you’re a fool, that you’re the biggest fool in the league. I never thought it possible, but listening to you … Well, maybe I am doing you a favor. You’re a fool if you don’t already know that your petty gods and the idolaters who worship them are working to bring the Disjunction sooner. The empress has evidence that they are doing so through the Cult of the Undivided Society.”
“Who told you these things?”
“That’s what you should already know. That’s what any fool in your place would know.”
“Why did imperial spellwrights attack Feather Island?” Nicodemus raised his voice for the first time. “Why did you kill innocent villagers?”
“We didn’t start any violence.”
“Do you know how we found you? There was a ghost ship floating out in the bay. All the men aboard were horribly burned. And so were the children. The children that you murdered. How could you?”
“We didn’t harm any childr—” The pyromancer cut herself off midsentence. “We didn’t.”
“Then tell me who did.”
She shook her head.
Nicodemus put the vial back into his belt purse and held his cloth bundle in both hands. “You are an intelligent woman. You know what I am capable of. You know that I believe you were responsible for what happened to those children. So know then that I will carry through with what I am about to threaten.”
She said nothing.
He held up the cloth bundle between them. “You’re brave enough that maybe you could bear the pain of your hand without opium. But take a long look at this.” He unwound the cloth bundle to reveal a chunk of nightmare. In places the skin was still intact, but mostly it was a motley of ulcerations, pus, boney growths. It formed four ropes of flesh at the end of which—nearly pushed off by the force of the tumors—were four human fingernails. “These,” Nicodemus said, “are your fingers.”
The pyromancer’s eyes were locked on the nightmare of flesh ravaged by the canker curses. She began breathing fast.
“This will be simple as anything,” Nicodemus said calmly. “I touch the stump of your right hand. Just a tap. I’ll tell Doria that it looks like the canker is back. She’ll cut off your whole hand this time. But you and I will have another one of these chats. I’ll tap whatever stump they give you. Then that will need to come off. You get the picture. Or maybe I won’t tell the physicians at all. Maybe I’ll just let the disease rot you inside out. It’s a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone but a murderer of innocents.”
The pyromancer shook her head.
“Why did you slaughter everyone on Feather Island?”
“We didn’t!” She still shook her head, a film of tears made her eyes bright.
“Who did then? Tell me!”
“We didn’t! We didn’t!”
Nicodemus stood. “Why did you murder those children?” He threw her nightmare fingers onto the pyromancer’s stomach.
“GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF OF ME!” she shrieked as her nightmare fingers rolled down to her lap.
“Why did you kill those children?”
“We didn’t do it! We didn’t! Oh Creator, get it off of me!”
“Who did?”
“CREATOR HELP ME! GET IT OFF OF ME!” she screamed. “Get it off! Get it off!”
Nicodemus plucked up the nightmare fingers without touching her. “Who killed the children?”
“It was one of your neodemons,” she said between sobs. “I swear on the Creator’s name! We were attacked in the morning.”
“What neodemon?”
“I don’t know. My regiment was hidden in Feather Village. We had bribed the locals to hide us, and early this morning we received orders to leave. I don’t know where to. I don’t know what we were meant to do. But when we were getting ready, a neodemon attacked us. I never got to see it. There was fire everywhere and smoke. It smelled like sulfur from the burning hells. When the smoke got into the villagers, they attacked us. They had sold us out to some neodemon that they were worshiping. Our captain ordered a counterattack. We tried to get what we could from the village before escaping.”
She paused to catch her breath. “More and more of the villagers started to attack us, but some killed themselves. There was lava and smoke everywhere. A few of us hid in the Near Tower. We could feel the ground shake as the neodemon walked about on the village’s Shelf. It was hell.” She began sobbing.
Nicodemus sat down, his mind working hotly. If she were telling the truth then the ruins would make more sense: half of the buildings looted, half of them untouched.
“It was either one of your neodemons, or your cults have finally helped the ancient demons cross the ocean,” the pyromancer said. “The worst was the children. They just began to scream and scream until suddenly they just died. Just dead.” Another sob.
Nicodemus had never encountered a neodemon powerful enough to do what was described. He had a sinking feeling in his gut.
The pyromancer continued. “Those of us in the Near Tower gathered all the cloth we could so that the hierophants could write lofting kites to get us off the island. The neodemon seemed to leave the island. All we had to do was fend off the occasional surviving villager who would attack us. But then you came and killed everyone.”
“Everyone but that one hierophant who escaped,” Nicodemus said calmly. “Where was he going?”
She shook her head, mucus glistening on her upper lip. “To the rest of the imperial expedition. I don’t know where it is. Only the wind mages know.”
“How many are in the expedition?”
/> “They didn’t tell us anything else. We’re just scouts.”
“And who is leading the expedition?”
“Magister Lotannu Akomma.”
“Of course,” Nicodemus grumbled. “Of course Vivian would send him.” He cleared his throat. “Why send scouts to the bay?”
“The empress found some evidence that the Cult of the Undivided Society is trying to bring on the Disjunction. That’s all I know. Creator help me. Creator forgive me but that’s all I know. It was one of your demons who attacked. This is all your fault! You have to stop worshiping the demons and trust in the Creator and the empress. You have to.” She began sobbing again.
“Was your expedition scouting in preparation for an invasion?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicodemus took in a long breath. An imperial expedition was somewhere close enough for a hierophant to reach via lofting kite. Whether the empire intended an invasion or some smaller action, this would mean bloodshed. No two ways around it.
“What else should I know?” Nicodemus asked in a softer voice.
“I’ve told you everything. Creator forgive me but I did.” More tears.
Nicodemus took the vial from his belt purse. “You did the right thing, Magistra.” She shook her head and began sobbing harder. Nicodemus waited patiently. “You have been through hell. I am sorry for that.”
Her breathing finally slowed.
Nicodemus stepped closer. “You need this for the shock as much as for the pain in your hand.” He held up the tincture of opium. “Here, Magistra.”
“I don’t care if it’s poison,” she said in the pitiful voice of one who has been sobbing and now has a stuffed nose. “I hope it is poison so that I don’t have to live with these memories anymore.”
“It is not poison, Magistra. It will make you sleep. I am sorry I had to be so rough with you; I needed to know the truth. No one will hurt you now.”
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