Page 50

Chapter 50

Ana gestured to me, calling, “Come! Come now, Din. Help me to my meal.”

I walked to her, took her by the arm, and guided her to her seat at the little table.

“Now, please—veil the lights in here a little,” she said. “It is too bright! I can see the luminescence through my blindfold.”

I did so, casting cloths over the mai-lanterns. Soon the chamber was quite dark, the corners swimming with deep shadows.

With a slight clearing of her throat, Ana squared up to the table, unwrapped the livers, and placed the black, gleaming nuggets of flesh in the bowl. Then she began violently cutting them to ribbons with her knife and fork. “Now sit,” she said as she worked. “Sit across from me, child, and give me a moment.”

I did so, repulsed by her mangling of the innards. Then she unceremoniously dumped all the kizkil mushrooms on top of the raw livers and began to mix them.

“Isn’t that dosage dangerous for you, ma’am?” I asked.

“You need not speak, Din,” she said archly. “For I shall be unable to respond soon.”

“Because…”

A wry smile. “Because my mouth will be quite full, of course.” She then gobbled down the awful dish, bite by bite. The sight was so horrid I had to turn away. She even lifted the bowl to her lips and feverishly scooped the dregs into her mouth. Finally she lowered the bowl and sat back with a satisfied sigh, her chin and lips now dark and bloodied.

“Another meal,” I said softly, “like the Empire of old.”

Her blindfolded head snapped to attention. “What?” she said.

“The last time you ate, ma’am. You said such banquets were a common sight in the ages of the first and second emperors.”

She remained totally silent, appearing to wait for more. A drop of blood gathered at her chin and dropped into her lap.

“And you made many proper deductions then,” I said nervously. “So…perhaps the same shall happen now?”

“Hm. That is true, Din,” she murmured. “And I thank you for your indulgence. Now…I shall reflect on our quarry’s nature, and desires. Then, perhaps, I can spy his last, most hidden works, and decide how we will proceed this black night.”

Ana fell silent once more. She sat back in the darkness, her pale form dappled with blood, her blindfold still tight about her eyes. I worried that the mood reagents might sicken her, and she’d topple over at any moment.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” I ventured.

“Be still, child!” she answered softly. “I am thinking.”

I waited. Minute after minute passed in the stinking dark of that place.

And then Ana seemed to undergo a change.

It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen; though seen was not the right word, for it was so dark in the chamber that I sensed it more than anything. Ana’s body remained still, her blindfolded head bowed at an angle, yet I became aware of ligaments tensing at the edge of her face, or about her neck, a curious coiling that somehow reshaped the whole of her visage.

Then I smelled it: a strange, acrid, shivering musk, slowly suffusing the air. It leaked into my nostrils and tickled the backs of my eyes, as if I’d accidentally punctured some chamber of fume in the earth. My heart raced, and my pulse quickened. I began to feel a deep, unnatural sense of threat, like I was not sitting with my commanding officer at her table, but rather trapped in this place with a predator, stalking me in the dark.

I stared at her then and saw not the Ana I knew, but a skeletal thing, draped in shadow, with bloodied cheeks like corded leather and her snowy scalp pulled far back from her brow. Her neck appeared elongated, and her long, pale fingers twitched in her lap. Her grin no longer seemed to have any trace of humor in it but was enormous and savage, and though I felt it had to be my imagination, her smile suddenly seemed to have far more teeth than I’d recalled before.

Then Ana spoke, yet her voice was once more queerly deep and resonant, like it emanated from some glottal chamber in her chest: “Why has he not yet attacked the Shroud? Why not strike when we are vulnerable? Still I think upon this…Why not yet?” A wet click from the back of her throat. She cocked her head, and I saw the glint of bloodied teeth in a wide grin. “What does his heart desire, this man who has no nation, no kingdom…nor even a face?”

She shivered and sat back, moving past the penumbra of the lantern light. More minutes passed, and when she spoke again her voice was even deeper than before; not the voice of a man, but a voice distorted and warped, so much so it was difficult for me to parse her words.

“How was he there that night?” she murmured.

“P-pardon, ma’am?”

“How did he poison that cup without anyone ever noticing it?” she whispered. “Did he do it before it ever touched the king’s hands? And how did he fell Gorthaus without anyone spying him and seeing he was a stranger to this court? Or…was he always there?” Her pale fingers reached forward, as if grasping an invisible arm. “Tell me…the king had a twin, did he not?”

My eyes fluttered as I recovered the memory. “So Darhi said, yes.”

“And Pavitar had a twin, born dead. And Darhi was a survivor of three.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She meditated on this, then turned her face to the west. Then she twitched in her chair and turned yet again, now facing where Pyktis’s corpse lay in the shadows. She pulled her blindfold away—a normally mad thing for her to do, given her dislike of new environs—and gazed at the body, as if enraptured.

“Din,” she said. “Your knife.”

“What, ma’am? You—”

“Your knife. Give me your knife, boy— now !”

I did so, dismayed by the request. She took it, then flew to the corpse’s side. For a moment I feared she intended to mar the body, butchering it in her madness, yet a voice in my mind told me this was not so.

She will not savage it, the voice said quietly and calmly. She plans to eat it, to feast upon it—for this is the feast she has so long hungered for, true?

Ana raised the knife; but my horror was entirely wrong, for rather than slashing at the flesh, she wedged the blade between the corpse’s teeth and wiggled it back and forth, until a tooth came free with an awful crunch. Then she dropped my knife and turned the tooth over and over in her fingers, like a witch reading her scrying stone.

“A fine tooth,” she whispered. “A fine imperial tooth, healthy and strong from many calcious grafts…” She tapped it against the floor. “And recent grafts at that. This has no staining or weakness from months in the jungle. Why would Pyktis bother to modify his teeth? Except…”

She froze, and dropped the tooth. Then she stood and turned to the northwest. She walked to the chamber walls as if she could see through them and behold some distant movement in the High City on the hills above.

“His dogs,” she whispered. “Of course …of course he killed the dogs first.”

“His…dogs?” I asked. “Jari Pavitar’s dogs? Do they matter in this, ma’am?”

“Do they matter?” Then she shook her head, laughed, and turned to face me. “Do they matter, Din? I…I see it now! A hidden piece! One kept off the board entirely, while all our eyes were fixed on something else…” Then she cried out: “Oh, how I see it! I see all of it now, I see it now! ”

Still shaking her head, Ana dreamily walked toward me, and when she entered the light of the lamps, I gasped.

Her wide yellow eyes were quivering and dancing, shaking in her skull just as my own shook when I summoned my memories. In the blue mai-light, and with the blood still fresh on her chin and her features so strangely distended, the sight struck me cold.

“I see his game, his mind!” cried Ana. “I see all the warp and weft he spins about us, even now! What a fine, clever officer he was, and what a finer one he would have made, had his heart not been so poisoned by the puerile dreams of petty men!”

Her devilish smile lingered on her face for a moment; then she seemed to suddenly remember my gaze, and she turned away into the shadows, like she’d committed some indiscretion. She wiped her mouth of blood and replaced her blindfold. When she returned to the dim lamplight, she seemed returned to her ordinary self, though there remained something strange and stretched to her face.

“I have made my decision,” she whispered. “I know where the other weapon lies.”

“D-do you, ma’am?” I said softly.

“Oh, yes. I know all the threads within his design now! Fetch my lyre!”

“Your lyre, ma’am?”

“Yes, for that shall be most critical! Fetch that and bring Thelenai and the others back in! For I’ve a task for her, and much scheming to do. And then, Dinios, you shall lead myself and the wardens back to the High City, to return the wealth of that kingdom.” She grinned horribly. “And there I shall lay the entire plot bare.”

—

We threw ourselves to it then, hurtling about in the dark, following Ana’s cries and exhortations, building her grand plan beneath the darkening skies. When our work took us outside she stayed within her carriage, whispering or crying instructions through a crack in the door, sightlessly predicting our movements. I was reminded of the tale of the eidolon trapped in its mausoleum, whispering tales of how all its neighboring dead had come to lie in their shelves.

With each horrible revelation, our pace grew faster. Thelenai nearly screamed in rage, and Malo gasped and cursed; but still we worked, breathlessly and thoughtlessly, seizing weapons and tools to secure our path ahead.

“A red rocket,” Ana said to Thelenai as our preparations ended. “We must see a red rocket when your work is done. Only then can I proceed with confidence. Is that clear?”

“Very,” said Thelenai weakly, now stripped of all her pride and dignity. “I shall send it into the skies at the very moment.”

“Excellent. Now, Din—how long has it been since the scribe-hawk departed with news for Kardas?”

“Nearly three hours by now, ma’am,” I said.

“Good,” purred Ana’s voice through the crack in the carriage. “Then I believe we are ready to proceed.”

I assisted in loading the last of the Yarrow treasure onto the litter, and we began our long trek up to the High City. Yet my thoughts lingered on the sound of Ana’s voice just now.

Was that tenor still present? That queer, sepulchral timbre? What did we make here in the deep dark, in service for this strange being?

I thought of the Shroud, and how I’d once imagined it to be a chrysalis, holding some brewing horror within its flesh. As we hastened our steeds up the slopes in the depths of night, I wondered if this hidden threat still remained true, but perhaps I had been looking in the wrong direction entirely.