INTERLUDE 9I: THE NURSE AND THE PATIENT
“Look for her with a smile on her face as the volley of darts falls about her. There – there is your strength. She is already undying, more so with every wound she sustains, until at last she is an immortal corpse. Do not see the dead body! She is beyond it, in the Pavilions of the Victors upon golden sands. You just do not realise this form of immortality because you have been trained to unsee it. One must be a corpse before one can become a statue.”
– taken verbatim from ‘The Swordfaith Lectures’ recordings, Urdara 966 NE
22nd Taura, 999 NE
She turned into the path, noting the rows of dead bushes on either side once she passed through the half-hanging gate into the yard. The lifeless brown bundles of twigs were blasted by a gust of the early-morning breeze, saluting her stiffly as she strode between them. She smiled. She was in her element. This was where she belonged.
* * *
It was with a heavy heart that the nurse put the key in the lock, turning it and pulling down on the handle. This section of the building, dubbed the Asylum, was a little different to other parts. Magical locks weren’t the norm, but exceptions had to be made for exceptional… patients. She didn’t know what she’d find inside: the morose, withdrawn waif or the mean-tempered creature full of vim and vitality she’d seen that one time. She knew what she’d rather find, of course, but beggars couldn’t be picky. She’d get through to the poor deluded girl in the end. She’d get there. Sordono was doing his part. She just had to stick at it.
Stick at it.
She drew a deep breath, steeling herself against the aggression which could potentially descend upon her, and swung the door open. She slipped inside and closed it behind her as quickly as she could manage without making noise, drawing attention. She was anxious to see how much progress her patient had made.
None, it appeared. Still bruised and broken, it was the waif huddled in the chair which greeted her. The patient’s pale, purple-splotched face was turned aside to the window, staring at it as though her despondent gaze could penetrate the ochre-stained glass, discern something of interest in the empty skies beyond.
The nurse sighed, noting the mess on the floorboards, the bottle’s shards rising like jagged islands from a puddle of faintly-glittering fluid.
“You didn’t take your tonic,” she chided her patient gently, as she drew a rag from her sleeve and bent to clean up. She used the tone of voice one might use to admonish an errant child; but the girl had changed, at least outwardly. She no longer looked like a child. “Isn’t this the second time?” she continued as she straightened up and deposited the rag full of broken glass on the dresser. “How do you expect your wounds to heal, my dear? How will you get better if you don’t want to get better? Bless you… You did eat, didn’t you? Only a bit. Oh dear. Come here, let me help you.”
Luckily, she had a spare bottle of the best healer’s tonic right there in her belt. She approached slowly, not wanting to disturb the girl, but her patient reacted as though the nurse were a ball of living fire – as she stepped closer the poor waif, eyes still fixed pointlessly on the window, began to stir in the chair. Her deadly legs curled up onto the seat, then the girl started to unconsciously lean over the arm of the chair farthest away, closest to the window, shrinking back from her guardian.
The nurse didn’t chuckle; she couldn’t even bring herself to smile sadly. The time for games was long past. It brought a genuine tear to her eye, to see her get such a reaction.
We’re getting nowhere.
Perhaps they were right. Perhaps she’s a lost cause.
The experiment had all been her idea, of course. She was the one responsible. If anyone was going to call an end to things, it would be her.
The nurse reached out with a gentle hand, smoothing down the girl’s bedraggled hair with soft strokes of her fingertips. Her patient flinched away violently at the first contact, but then shuddered and stilled herself, closing her eyes, implying she would accept the nurse’s touch.
Still smoothing the girl’s hair with her right hand, she retrieved the spare tonic from her belt with her left, swiftly unstoppered it, and brought it to the girl’s lips in a single practised motion.
The girl jerked away, bringing up her hands to fend off the drink, but it was only a half-effort. There was no fight left in her. The healing tonic shot straight down her throat, and by the time she’d stopped spluttering, the nurse had fetched the brush from the dresser and had set to work on the poor girl’s hair.
“So much grey, for one so young,” she said idly as she combed through a particularly tough lug, making her patient wince. “You must’ve been under such stress, before you came here.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Whole locks had lost their colour, and the ghost-hairs were mingled with the brown all across her head. She didn’t ever tell the girl how much of it was falling out, the handfuls she pulled from the brush each morning. It would’ve only disturbed the poor thing even more, in all likelihood.
“Mmm,” the girl said.
“Oh, we’re talkative today, aren’t we, dear?” She managed a chuckle now. “Maybe we’ll see you brighten up a bit, once you’re more awake?”
The patient said nothing more and the moment the nurse stopped pulling the brush through her hair, her empty gaze returned to the sunlit, orangey window.
The nurse straightened the bedsheets like any good carer would, then collected the chamberpot as she withdrew back to the door.
She held the key tight in the fingers of her free hand, once more preparing herself mentally for the threshold crossing.
“Breakfast will be served in twenty,” she said, keeping her voice level. “I’ll bring it up, okay?”
No response.
It’s okay, she told herself as she put the key in the lock and got the door open. It’s okay. It’ll happen. There’s always tonight. Maybe, tonight…
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
The door of the house was in a better state than the gate at the end of the yard. Even still, she poked the lock with a splinter and it clicked, the door yawning open with a creak.
She didn’t need to peer inside. She knew what awaited her.
Fate, she thought, smiling grimly to herself. The fate I create.
* * *
She took her midday meal in the private dining room where only a few could fit at once. Windowless and furnished with a single table and two couches, it was empty when she arrived, and she smiled to herself. She preferred seclusion. She tore at her red venison and chewed her green beans as noisily as she fancied, mouth open as she stared for the millionth time at the different portraits on the walls. Many depicted the ancient founders of the organisation, back when things had been different. Others depicted, supposedly, the actual Founders. She always found her eyes drawn back to Arreath’s cool stare, his youthful features beneath the sky-blue cowl.
Did you see all this, old man? she wondered. Did you see my patient up there? Did you know whether she’d come around?
She matched his stare with her own.
Well, did you?
There was no answer. There was never any answer. How could there be?
When Jerelus and Wrynka entered, she saw the looks on their faces, and waved them over even though she knew what they were going to say.
“Go on then,” she said once they’d settled themselves, peering from one to the other through the steam-clouds rising off their plates. “Be honest. You think I’m crazy.”
“No one’s sayin’ that,” Jerulus blurted, his teeth full of crushed green beans. “It’s just –”
“Yeah right.” She laughed. “I’m sure it’s all anyone can talk about.”
“Why are you even doing it?” Wrynka asked. She was bolder than her male friend, her shrewd, beady eyes looking out of place on the face of one so young. “This is hardly the same as the other Asylum patients. You think she’s going to come out the other side like the rest of them? You think she’s going to be a productive member of society?”
“The program never failed before.”
“What worries me is that you always said –”
“There’s a first time for everything.” She met the unmoving gaze of Arreath Ril one last time as she forked her final few veggies. “There’s a first time for everything…”
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
There was a broken clock in what had once been a dining room, at the rear of the property, lurking silently in the shadows. What a wonder, even if it was a small one! Such a treasure… She didn’t need to touch it but she wanted to. Her fingers delicately traced the hands, frozen in place, both pointing almost to six. She glanced around the room, piercing the veils of the darkness and the past simultaneously.
She saw them in her mind’s eye. Packing up, leaving. She had the names of the previous occupants, the Berrysons, their appearances… She had their futures, written in red ink across a narrow country lane… She could follow those who’d robbed them, robbed and killed them before they’d even gotten ten miles from Mund… She could follow the thieves back…
* * *
“It’s just that there are so many demands on my time,” she complained at breakfast the following morning. “You would think, all things considered, I’d be able to find the time. But we’ve been so busy lately.”
“Tell me about it,” Wrynka said, letting gruel fall off her spoon back into her bowl.
Everyone sitting at the mess hall table started to grumble, voicing their own pet peeves about the state of things these days. No one took it too far – everyone knew they were better off than most in Mund, but they were rushed off their feet, and it only got worse every day. They each had their own roles, their own responsibilities, and unlooked-for tasks were springing up left right and centre. Training new starters was one of Wrynka’s jobs, and the bags under the beady eyes suggested the young lady hadn’t slept well.
Students, keeping her up with questions.
“How are the girls coming along, Wrynka?” she asked. She didn’t really need to know the answer, but it was better to keep the conversation flowing than let a depressed silence take hold. Moments like that were precisely why she avoided people in the first place.
Wrynka seemed to suddenly wake up, and replied with almost the exact same series of pat niceties she’d used the last time she’d been asked. The nurse only half-listened anyway, using the distraction of Wrynka’s animated speech to pocket a few pieces of crispy bacon for her patient. What the others didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
When she’d brought another spare bottle of tonic up this morning, she’d found the girl in much the same catatonia, body withdrawn into the chair, mind withdrawn into the morning light on the window pane. Even still, she had the same sense of trepidation as always when she returned. She settled the breakfast tray on the floor, taking care not to spill the cup of milk, then straightened up, reaching into her pocket, getting out the key…
She turned it in the lock, stooped to retrieve the tray in her right hand, then put her left on the handle.
This time a fist connected with her throat as soon as the door was three inches ajar; she was still swinging it open with her left hand as the next blow landed, not knocking her back but instead driving her sideways, towards the door frame. It was all the nurse could do to twist her body, somehow stumbling into the room, simultaneously keeping herself in the doorway to prevent the patient getting past her.
Three more blows rocked her. The ball of the girl’s foot came down against her weak leg’s kneecap, almost inverting it; a chopping strike came down just under her ear, throwing a whole bunch of usually-unfeeling neck tendons into sudden spasm; then, just when the nurse realised what was about to happen, the girl swooped low like a diving bird, a skinny leg sweeping across the floor to take both the nurse’s feet out from under her.
She leaned back on the weak knee when her patient’s leg-sweep struck her, out of place ligaments and bones quickly finding their respective places, and she rode the wave of the spasms shooting down her shoulder, breathing slowly in a measured pace through her nose as she regained her cool. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to crush her windpipe but, as they all knew, there was a first time for everything – and this time it had been close.
The leg-sweep failed, despite her fragile condition, and the girl sprang back –
The nurse pivoted her limbs, cartwheeling to bring the tray in her right hand safely down to the floor.
“You almost made me spill the milk,” she chided the girl as she came back to her feet. “So, you are Everseer, after all.”
“No!” the girl screamed, fists melting to wobbling jelly-fingers in the space of an instant, hands pressing themselves to the sides of her head, trapping the wisps of colourless hair. “No! Never!”
“But that’s what you told us when we found you, my dear.”
“No! No I didn’t! You’re wrong – wrong… Y-you found me…”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Oh, oh nooooooo…”
Without taking her eyes off the girl, the nurse reached back and took the key from the lock, then leaned on the door to ensure it was firmly shut behind her before locking it once more.
“Time for another one on one session, I feel,” she told the patient. “You can skip breakfast five more minutes, right? I’ll avoid the face so you can still eat. There’s always more tonic but one shouldn’t take it on an empty stomach. I saved you bacon, by the way, but we really ought to capitalise on the progress you’re making first, Everseer.”
“Y-you… you’re… Everseer…”
She laughed scornfully in response. “How absurd! Such a delusion! Me? I’m merely your nurse. You are my patient –”
“– Killstop –”
“Everseer,” she corrected the girl instantly. “Killstop never existed. Killstop was never real. How many times must you be told? It’s time to let go of the madness, Everseer! Time to face the past, face what and who you are!”
“What? What?” The patient was regressing already, a certain distance coming into her voice and into her stare. She was lowering her hands.
The fight was leaving her.
No! It’s not too late!
The correct path demanded pain. Destiny demanded she invite retaliation. She would need to design attacks which wouldn’t debilitate, only agonise, leave the girl fully-functional in terms of counter-strike options.
She flung out both her own hands. One sank into the girl’s scalp, snagging a bunch of the listless hair near the roots. The other was extended like a claw at the bare cheek, sinking nails-first into the soft flesh thanks to the speed of her motion.
Before the girl could grip her wrists, she had already ripped her hands away, forming a small deadly fist out of each hand.
She expected some minor form of evasion. Some attempt to reduce the damage she dealt. But no. The patient was still surprising her, it seemed. The girl just stood there and took it, and the results were simply irritating.
Punches landed like fireballs, the impacts of several distinct blows falling out of the timestream simultaneously, such that they struck at the same instant. The combined force sent her patient ricocheting across the chamber, shattering three of her ribs against the leg of the bed with a sound like a bundle of dry branches cracking.
The nurse sighed when the patient didn’t struggle to rise, just lying there at her mercy, chest filled with sharp edges of bone, rising and falling with irregular, shallow breaths.
Too late… too late.
Maybe I should just end it. Maybe they were right all along.
Then the nurse gritted her teeth.
No.
Stick at it.
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
They were in Sticktown, in Cutterwells! Not nine minutes away as the mortal crawled. She could even see the scarf the female owner of the house had been wearing the day she and her husband packed up and left. She could see it changing hands, once, twice… Three weeks ago the scarf had briefly adorned the neck of a demented old matriarch, great-grandmother to sixteen, bought as a last-minute eightieth birthday gift for seven coppers by one of her grandsons.
While Netricia Berryson slept eternally in a shallow grave made of reeds and weeds, her scarf would hang upon a bedpost for almost four years, until Dear Old Matriarch’s overconfidence in her capabilities sent her head over heels down the stairs…
Wait. Back up there.
There was nothing easier.
She scried closer in on the thieves. They were moving closer.
They were coming here.
Suddenly she saw it like she’d never before.
Oh. Of course they robbed their house from them too.
* * *
It was with a lighter heart that she unlocked the door. Three days had passed, and the ritual was starting to form. She had no idea exactly what to expect, and it elated her. She could no longer try to bring the breakfast tray in with her – not without spraying the milk in the cup across the room. On her last visit she’d been forced to employ a centrifugal helix as she entered, sloshing up the walls left and right like bathwater, just to slip the killing-blows aimed at her cranium, spine, heart. She no longer had to defend the doorway, even before it was locked. Escape wasn’t on the girl’s mind anymore. The route of egress could be left wide open – the only thing her patient desired was for the nurse to take a dose of the same medicine.
It was minutes and minutes of concentrated violence – for the first time in a very, very long time she was actually able to practice her skills against a worthy opponent, train and hone her own reflexes, battle-instincts… She’d chosen well, and her persistence was starting to pay off, even if the girl’s mental barriers were proving more difficult to break down than she’d anticipated. There was little doubt in her mind that when her patient reached the fullness of her power, she’d be almost her match. Her willpower, her stubbornness… the girl was a fighter. There was much in her to be lauded.
Much still to be purged.
“You – are a – killer – born!” she huffed, twisting rapidly in an obscene contortion, the only way to avoid a heel-palm strike that would’ve sent her into cardiac arrest; the soles of her feet found purchase on the unlikeliest of surfaces, but her patient followed, pursuing her in a diagonal line across the ceiling from one corner of the room to the opposite.
“Not,” the girl huffed back as they moved from the ceiling to the wall to the floor and back again.
“Want to – kill me!” she gasped. “Want to – end it!”
“No!”
“You – are – more – like her – every day!”
“No!”
“Everseer!”
“No!”
“Everseer!”
“No!”
“Nightfell.”
The girl froze. The nurse slowed, stopped, smiled.
It’s working. Gods below, it’s working!
Enchantment was always fifty-fifty with arch-diviners, especially powerful ones. It’d taken long enough that she’d become convinced her dream would never be made a reality… but now, finally, it was working.
“Nightfell?” Her patient’s voice was thick with unaddressed emotion.
“That’s our name now!” she replied, moving closer and putting out a hand to take the girl’s face by the cheek. “That’s what they call us!”
There was no resistance, no flight, no counter; the patient froze, transformed into a mannequin.
She stood there, squeezing her patient’s face with a bland smile on her lips.
“Us?” the mannequin managed eventually.
“Yes, us. The two of us. We’re the same, you and I, aren’t we?”
“Y-you. You’re… Everseer.”
“If I am, what does that make you?”
“Ev… I don’t know.”
Later on, as she settled in for an evening of cider and reading in front of the ensorcelled harp, Sordono came by her room, her go-to enchanter checking on his progress. More than the slip of the tongue, where the girl almost called herself ‘Everseer’ – more telling was the follow-up.
“I don’t know,” she told Sordono, seeing his eyebrows raise in delighted surprise. “She said I don’t know!”
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
Pieces slotted into place. Understanding lit the room in a thousand nameless colours. She saw the three of them entering in eight minutes and forty-two seconds, but she also saw them entering two nights ago, conducting their illicit business. They came here regularly, in fact.
Inkatra. It’s always bloody inkatra.
She cast about.
They do a good clean-up job, to be sure.
The set-up was pretty sophisticated, all things considered. They were using an inkatra-hit once a week to shroud their activities – or someone else was on their behalf. So long as there was a chance they’d conduct their activities elsewhere…
Ah. Very sophisticated.
They were selling their drugs out of various locations. They were being told where to go by an anonymous sponsor – in fact, the movements of several different groups were being orchestrated by a single overseer…
Well now, that was silly of them, wasn’t it?
* * *
“I’m not Leafcloak, you know,” Jerelus repeated in a husky voice, for what had to be the tenth time.
She started laughing. It was highly-amusing, the way his eyes travelled across her face, studying every follicle. His gaze was currently fixated on her right earlobe, and she couldn’t help but find his seriousness hilarious.
“I trust you,” she said, still grinning. “You’ll get us there. Just be glad we’re meeting in the middle like this. When they were running Facechanger for real, it must’ve been a nightmare.”
“But I don’t know –”
“– where to begin, by which you mean, you don’t know how to make it painless.”
His eyes met hers, then he blinked rapidly before closing them, drawing a deep, shuddering breath.
“You’re frightened you’ll hurt me and I’ll get angry. Well, you will. And I won’t. It’s my choice not to involve Sordono, isn’t it? I know what I’m in for. I understand the risks and rewards far better than you. You want to get on my bad side, Jerulus?”
His eyes shot open, thrown wide in alarm.
“You want to get on my bad side, keep acting like you comprehend your limits better than I do. Nothing could be further from the truth, Kultemeren my witness.”
He drew another breath, but this time it was a sharp one, filled with purpose.
“That’s it, good,” she murmured, seeing the future changing through the window of fate, the transparent glass in the rotten frame that was her high vantage point over time’s realm. “Yes. Begin now. Trace right off Sordono’s template. You’ll have the knack of it in no time.”
“I’m going to start with your eyes,” he said. “It always starts there…”
Her druid’s voice sank into the low register of one whose mind is afar. Like someone replying to a question while absorbed in the last pages of an exciting novel. It was strange, seeing both of someone’s eyes staring deep into one of your own.
She closed her eyes again. She could already feel the itching around her left eye socket, the itching becoming burning, the burning passing away to leave behind nothing but exposed nerves –
Nerves into which salt was scrubbed with coarse sandpaper.
She felt the flood of his power, stemming the worst of the pain as he started to shift the shape of her bones. She screamed all the same, but it didn’t take her long to exert her own form of control over the torment lacing every particle of her face. Pain brought out the animal in people, it was true, of course, and yet there was a place beyond pain in which each moment of discomfort brought you closer to your true self. There was nothing quite like the tranquillity to be found on those far-flung shores, once one was cast up on the sands, rejected by purifying waves of agony.
In the immortal sands, knowing that time would blow it all away if she took too long, she scrawled the blueprint, the single word which, if it took hold, would change the course of history:
‘NIGHTFELL.’
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
There was no need to interrogate anyone. No need to take prisoners. She exposed a great deal of the organisation which employed them before the three thieves – three killers – ever even arrived. They’d really fallen afoul of the wrong magic-user tonight. She reckoned she had enough information already to infiltrate the gang’s upper echelons and bring it crashing down, if she so chose.
But where would be the fun in that?
Three killers…
She’d hated the thought, once. As far as she could tell, the common theme in every arch-diviner’s initial empowerment involved the choice as to whether or not to kill an aggressor. More specifically, the rejection of killing. Her own experience, coupled with the death of her father, his half-accidental fall almost forgotten in the chaos of that night… it had inspired her to stop killing in all its forms. Even to name herself after her mission.
Now?
Now she knew just where to stand, in the corner beside the dining room door as it swung open. She knew none of them would see her until it was too late.
When she first received her power, she’d forgotten the simple truth. The death of her cold-hearted father. The killing – it had already happened. Her rejection of it – it was like a child, pushing back against the rolling sky to stop the sun falling.
Now?
Now she was all grown up.
* * *
There were no words. The girl stared, dumbstruck, upon her face.
“What?” the nurse asked in the girl’s voice. “What’s got your goat in a grinder? I’d say you look like you’ve seen a ghost, only I have it on good authority there are none on this floor. Have they been breaking the rules again?”
The patient, bless her, looked like she was about to throw up.
“Here,” said the nurse, taking a single step closer that sent the girl scurrying to the back wall. “You forgot to greet me properly. Let’s see about putting a smile back on those lips.”
“B-but y-you,” the patient gasped, swallowing and emitting dry clicks from her throat, gulps of air that fought incoherently against the flow of her words. “You’re – I – you we are –”
“You were Everseer. I was Tanra. Now, we are Nightfell.” She’d reached striking range. “How’s about that hello?”
This time she didn’t relent, holding nothing back. She left the former Everseer a pulpy mess on the floor it’d take ten tonics to fix.
So be it, she thought as she withdrew, locking the door behind her. That’s what you get for not fighting back.
For not fighting yourself.
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
The dining room door opened, its edge clashing lightly against the wooden wall so that the weathered surface stopped six inches beyond the tip of her nose, leaving her well-hidden in the corner behind it. The three scumbags went to their accustomed places about the table, setting the lantern in the centre, their packets and pouches of herbs and gold around it. They were talking rather loudly, considering the illegality of their line of work, but she tuned it out as best she could. She already knew every possibility their conversation could encompass.
She shifted the parameters of their futures, focussing fractals of alternate destinies through an eye that trapped only a single thread. All she did was lift the lower half of her right leg, bringing her knee into contact with the door, gently tapping it.
All three looked up to regard her as the door swung shut with just the perfect amount of force to close it, no excess.
Looking up at her – that was the moment that sealed their doom.
If she went a certain way, it would take the one at the back less than nine seconds to realise what was really wrong.
“But why’d you lose that thing?” Ystor says, pointing with a shaking hand to the blank, black mask in her hand.
That way seemed fun.
* * *
“A fabric,” Sordono said.
The nurse snorted, eyeing him over the edge of the book.
“I’m not joking,” he went on, sounding a trifle hurt. “That’s how she sees her power – I mean, your power.”
“Oh, I know you’re telling it straight. It’s just funny.” She lowered the book; she was only reading for effect anyway. “Does this new face really bother you that much?”
“It’s not the face. It’s how you’re acting.” He was disgruntled, now. “I’ve barely touched your mind since last week, but you’re… acting more and more like her.”
“You think I don’t know what I’m doing?” she asked sweetly.
She would’ve sworn up and down she didn’t use the perilous voice, but he paled right before her eyes, and hurriedly denied he had any doubts. She left him, heading back to the Asylum, and felt troubled.
Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one’s fearsome reputation could be an impediment rather than a boon. It helped in so many situations, but at times like this? It was impossible to form a human connection, even with someone whose bed she’d shared. Had that been under some unspoken duress too?
She considered it briefly, then discarded it from her consciousness before her ‘gift’ could devour the mystery, before her magic could rob all sense of magic from her, churning out the cold hard truth like diamonds from coal. There had to be some things she could not know. But only so much of it could she control.
This was something that frightened her, from time to time, especially now that she was back here in the moment, whirling and kicking and gouging, at peace. It was really the only thing that kept her going. The mystery represented by her chief foes. Timesnatcher, of course, and also to a degree this girl whose fingers she was snapping. But looming over all of it, the great black mountain:
Ulu Kalar. His wings of nothingness, blotting out the open skies forever, blotting out every thing, every future…
That was her apocalypse. Humanity, walking without guide through a dark forest destiny, stumbling over every root, never learning, never seeing, prey to all the wild things once held at bay by the light of day. Drake talons descend, enacting overblown revenge upon the once-proud mortal men and women and children, those naive innocents who in their depraved arrogance thought themselves safe, thought themselves over and above such concerns as the nuances she lived with every hour… The fates of long-dead dragons. A so-called mad seer’s predictions of doom.
To the rest of them it was nonsense but to her it was real and she was the only one who was right. The only one possessing eyes with which to see. And for that, as the adage went, the kings of the blind condemned her.
Ulu Kalar’s Return; that was the ‘nightfall’, as she saw it, just like the ancient stories of Lordimer and Lithiguil told about – yet it was to her as a thing that had already happened.
They’d take it for a skin of darkness, but it went right to the core. Night already fell.
An avatar of defeat.
And as she swung the girl’s head again and again into the wall, she knew it. This wasn’t her trying to help. This wasn’t a way to fix things.
It was destiny, the one she’d made for herself. She’d failed, and to fail at the most important task in history? To helm the ship that capsized with the Realm itself as the cargo? That was failure epitomised. When she crossed the Door to Infernum the acolytes of Wyrda or Utenya would find her in the dusty streets, hail her and make her a saint, make her relive this despair until it was all that remained of her.
Hammering the side of the girl’s head until it split – split open –
“Sahhhhh!” she hissed to herself, almost throwing the tonic over the girl’s face in her haste to heal her.
It didn’t work.
The patient was lying motionless, eyes blank and somehow misaligned – and the wind came whipping about the nurse, the wind of the void, of Kalar’s wings, its scream deafening her, the shadow falling over the lands beneath her eyrie.
“No!” she cried. “Sordono! Warn Jerulus – I come now!”
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
“Evening, boys.”
She waved to the Cutter-Boys with the mask, leaning leisurely against the wall with her right foot up. She felt luxuriated, very much like a big cat sitting in a tree on the savannah, gloating over the trio of hamstrung gazelles flopping around in the grass below.
“Don’t go for your drugs. Drugs are bad. Those drugs are very bad. And right now? Right now going for them at all would prove terminal. Immediately.”
“But why’d you lose that thing?” Ystor Shellmain of Funnel Mile said, pointing with a shaking hand to the blank, black mask in her hand. “You’re – you’re that one, aren’t you? That new champion.”
She shrugged, smiling wickedly.
“Naw, man!” said the well-built one on the left, Edvelar Tost. “No bow, see! No arrers! This is some get-up, innit?”
“I want in,” she said, “Egg Toast.”
She picked the least-insulting of the many insulting monikers this poor, unfortunately-named thug had been forced to endure in his childhood.
Egg Toast paled.
“Whadder yer mean, ‘in’?” he muttered. “Whadder yer wan’?”
“What do I want?” She pouted. “Why, everything any girl my age wants. A nice little job in a tea-house, not too many hours. A kind boy to go steady with… not too steady. A harp spelled for the hmph,” she cracked up, “the hmph, the la-la-latest melodies, oh gods…”
It was impossible. Impossible not to act. The future was true. It was happening, inhabiting the present moment by moment, just as it was fated to do.
“I won’t get what I want, though, will I? Live by the blade, die by the blade. That’s what you need to hear. What you always needed to hear.
“What I always needed to say.”
Now which blade was it again?
* * *
“You wanted her dead.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I was distracted. The trip to Panagor tired me.”
“You?”
“It happens.”
“It didn’t used to. It’s throwing that old woman out the window, that’s –”
“I know everything you could say before you say it, and choose the path to follow. Have a care over your words. You don’t want to fall on something… impractical.”
“I’m saying we need to try something different.”
“You really want me to let you in, don’t you?”
“Vee, please. You know I – I only want it to work. I want you to be right. I want what you want, remember? You know that. You told me that.”
“What people want changes.”
“And you want something different now.”
“You’re impure, Sordono. You used to be so different. Where did your purity go? Why are you no longer devout?”
“This isn’t about me. I’m trying to help you and –”
“You’re not and it is. I need you to realise, before we do this.”
“You mean… I’m allowed? I can find her deep-“
“You need to realise before we do this. Here, I’ll take this one off. Now. Look in my mind now.”
“I… oh.”
“Yes.”
“Very… oh… oh, merciless Mother…”
“Yes. You can stop looking now.”
“Th-thank you.… thank you…”
“Now you know what’s going to happen if you decide to play games with me, I think it’s time to get started. Do you have the necessary tools?”
“I – I think so –”
“Do you know why I ask questions like that, Sordono? Do you think I don’t know the answer?”
“You –”
“Yes, this way your average response time drops significantly. Come on, snap to it. I’m busy.”
“Yes! I mean – I’ll be right back.”
“Damn right you will.”
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
She’d never killed anyone before. Not deliberately, anyway. There’d been acts of omission, of course – those were everywhere. Technically, the way her power showed it, she’d killed thousands of times. Every choice in a time of crisis entailed a wealth of dead bodies, dead futures she could look back on. Go here. Save this person. There were always the places she left behind. There were always more needing her attention, lying trapped in the detritus of a cast-down building, gasping their final breaths after encountering the claws of some fiend, wondering, wondering why, why did that champion move away instead of closer, why have I been left here on the ground to bleed out…?
They never saw the needier victim. Even the most selfless people cared only about themselves once they were on the cusp of perishing forever.
But that was the point, wasn’t it? The killing – it still happened, whether or not her hand held the blade. Killstop was a fascination. ‘Never real’ indeed. It was a widely-broadcast lie built upon a foundation of self-deception.
This time her hand held the blade, and she released the safeguards preventing her from following it on its course. There would be no more acts of omission. The blade’s future had to be satisfied, brought into reality as a brutally-short series of crisp motions.
And so she moved.
* * *
19th Kailost, 976 NE
When the bad men come in, she pretends to be asleep, even though they know she is awake – they made far too much noise smashing the shutters. They know everyone is awake. They drag her from the bed by her heel, and she doesn’t try to fight back. She lies in the corner beneath the narrow window, and is forced to watch as something horrible happens. She isn’t quite sure what is happening, but it makes Mum and Dad cry, and when it’s over it’s red all over the sheets and people who should be moving aren’t anymore. There isn’t much beyond the shaking sickness moment but there it is: a window, and she’s perched upon the ledge like a little monkey, looking down at the room from above her own head. She sees herself, below her.
She turns slightly, peers through the dirty glass. She sees everything, and she’s scared. No one is supposed to see that much, but she does.
She looks back into the room, far older. Now even the bad men aren’t moving and she can see other things. She can see herself moving. She can see the bad men doing more bad things. They will kill her, and her little brother. They will hurt lots of people. Hundreds of people.
She doesn’t want to kill the bad men. She’s going to be a champion some day. She sees it, out there through the glass. Many things will happen between here and there, now and then.
No. She isn’t killing them. She just wants to watch them cry, how Mum and Dad cried, in the before. Her actions make perfect sense. The piece of smashed vase in her hand – it makes perfect sense. She’s fulfilling the sharp shard’s purpose. It is exalted above all the other bits of pottery lying around the little table. The vase was smashed for this, this duty. It was made, two-thousand and thirty-nine days ago, for this very moment.
She will take the bad men and while they wait for her to decide she will make them cry – while they wait she is making them cry, so when they move again all they will know is the sobbing, the weeping, the turning around of things that will make them never, ever hurt someone again. She will fix them, later. In time.
She still keeps the tiny, tiny pieces of brain in a miniature philtre, in the drawer beneath her cot.
In slurred voices they beg of her to revert the changes she’s wrought. In half-words and shapeless sentences, they supplicate her, moaning and pawing at her, dragging at her clothing, their wide-thrown eyes brimming with misery.
She doesn’t trust herself to speak.
“Got it out of your system?” the boy asks her, as if there were only the two of them in the room.
The fabric unfolded and she was less than half her age, regarding the masked boy as if he were a man.
She still didn’t trust herself to speak, so she just nodded instead.
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
The single-edged blade is double-edged, she mused as she moved. The double-edged blade is single-edged.
The series of movements was all too short, so she’d slowed things down from her perspective, just a little, letting the experience wash over her.
She intended on moving onto the table, one foot on either side of the lantern, and she felt the simple magic of her muscles as they compressed and expanded, felt the air rush over her skin as she sprang up. It was exhilarating.
Steel sang through empty space, bit into flesh, spine, flesh, and sang once more, its joy at its freedom an awesome thing just to hear. The weapon’s speed was such that not a single crimson dot would stain it. She was blessed to hold it, and it was blessed to be so held, cradled lightly in the fingers of one uniquely capable of releasing the limits placed on it by the rules of reality. The blade’s maker could have never imagined such an extreme realisation of its potential – his own potential.
Congratulations, Berko, she silently saluted the long-dead smith. You were a fine purveyor of your craft.
Flesh. Spine. Flesh again.
The third motion was coming up, and she anticipated it the same way she’d anticipate the third act of a captivating play.
How will it go? How exactly will it feel?
She knew, but life wasn’t just knowledge. It was inhabiting those moments you chose to. Knowledge just helped you pick the right ones.
She wanted to feel it, for real.
It was only now, moving in for her third kill, that she realised she was right about herself. She did feel things, when she killed, but she knew to an outsider, an accurate summary of the event would consist in, ‘she killed them and felt nothing’. She felt things, but not the right things. There was supposed to be all this guilt and sadness when extinguishing a candle that was the only source of light for a million alternate worlds, a million disparate futures. But she only saw that those worlds were wrong. This one – this one where the sick-minded trio were dead, decapitated in less than the blink of an eye – this was the right world.
And then she understood, as steel bit flesh, spine, flesh once more.
The single-edged blade cuts you, because it can’t. The double-edged blade never cuts you, because it can.
In knowing what she was, in understanding the danger she posed, not just to others but to herself – that was what allowed her to wield herself without fear.
What was I so afraid of?
* * *
It was with some ambivalence in her heart that the nurse put the key in the lock, turning it and pulling down on the handle. She didn’t know what she’d find inside: the morose, withdrawn waif or the mean-tempered creature full of vim and vitality she knew existed inside her. She didn’t even know what she’d rather find, if she was being honest with herself. The whole experiment had gotten out of hand and she hadn’t put anyone in a place to stop her. Sordono had only been doing his part. She just had to stick at it, no matter how sick she felt.
Stick at it.
She drew a deep breath, steeling herself against the aggression which could potentially descend upon her, and swung the door open. She slipped inside and closed it behind her as quickly as she could manage without making noise, drawing attention. She was anxious to see how much progress her patient had made.
She found neither of the creatures she’d expected.
The girl was standing in the centre of the room, grave and graven like some austere statue. She was wearing the attire that had been provided to her. The corset gave her a more-womanly appearance than her endowments deserved; the mask was in place, a black, expressionless void. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her abdomen.
Silent. Still.
The nurse glanced down at herself, suddenly uneasy.
But which am I? she wondered. How did I lock Everseer in the Asylum, and how did I become a faction-leader in the Thirteen Candles?
“Well?” the patient said, and unpredictably spun in place, both hands making dainty gestures at her sides, fingers gently gripping an imaginary skirt. “What do you think? Fetching, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
The nurse smiled wanly behind her own mask, elation trickling into her, though its source was hidden from her, taking the edge off the feeling. She was disconcerted. Discombobulated. She didn’t quite understand everything that had happened, but the way she felt? It was good.
It was like having a sister. A twin sister.
“You look almost as fetching as me,” she replied eventually, and gave her own little twirl.
“Racy,” the patient said. “Cradlesnatcher’s gonna have a heart attack.”
“Maybe,” she replied. “If the other changes don’t do it…”
“Oh, of course.”
There was the shared moment of amusement, as they both started to laugh –
Nothing.
Nothing precipitated the assault. No warning in her patient’s voice. No sense of doom in the temporal atmosphere. No movement, no stirring of the air giving indication of attack.
She didn’t see the girl come closer – only a single glimpse of the fist, one and a quarter inches from her face.
Normally such a glimpse would afford her the opportunity to evade the incoming blow – slip away, dodge aside, step inside – but now it was just a victim’s viewpoint. The everything beyond the window condensed, coalesced to four knuckles, filling her future.
She tried to back up, give ground – but it was too late.
For the first time in years, a strike took her by surprise. Not a weak one, either. A lesser creature – even a lesser arch-diviner – might have perished from a single punch such as this. If she hadn’t been shifting her weight to retreat –
And she was too used to having time to think through her actions.
She reeled before the follow-up blow, a hammer-fist to the temple that would’ve dropped her like a pole-axed cow if she hadn’t edged away slightly. The next, a knee to the ribs, caught her completely unawares, driving every iota of breath from her body and caving in a lower portion of her left lung even as it tossed her heedlessly across the chamber.
Was it that the changes had slowed her to match her patient, giving the girl the edge over her? No. No, it was the opposite. The girl’s power had been increased to match hers. That much was obvious now, despite its impossibility.
But how? That isn’t supposed –
Nausea gripped her, even as steel-like fingers gripped her by the throat, clutching and pulling at her very skin in an agonising way, swinging her through the air.
Her mirror-self pinned her to the ceiling and froze the moment, crouching over her upside down, snarling through the identical mask at her.
“You should’ve listened to them, Vee. You should’ve stayed away from me. Now look what you’ve done. You wanted a cloak made from the skins of your victims, I could’ve taken a commission. Sordono could’ve seen to that all on his own – I was defenceless. Defenceless, and utterly alone. But you had to go further. You had to make me want it. And I was so dark! so dark inside. Now your cloak, oh, it’ll be sewn to your shoulders! You’ll feel every raindrop, every blade as if it’s your skin that’s exposed! Don’t you see what you’ve done? You broke the rules, Tanra! Bad girl! Father’s naughty little girl! Back to your studies!”
There was only the one explanation.
She had this in her all along and I never saw it because she – because she –
It was beyond impossible.
She outstrips me.
The girl kicked off the ceiling with both feet, reversing and correcting the pull of their weights – bringing the nurse’s skull down against the floor with enough force to burst a steel helm apart.
She didn’t even hear it – she just felt the release as her brains were dashed across the carpet.
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
She wiped her knife clean. Good old kitchen knife. Perfect for disposing of vermin like these.
She sheathed the blade, demiskinned a few packets of inkatra, and headed to the front door.
She let it clatter to behind her, and stood there in the dark yard. Clouds obscured the moonlight. The path under her feet was choked with weeds. The dead bushes continued their stiff salute in the late-night, early-morning breeze.
This place had died long before its owners. Maybe now its thieves were dead, it would come back to life with the spring.
She was leaving uncertainty behind. Certainty – that was all that was ahead of her.
She replaced the mask, patted her demiskin, and headed out the gate.
Next stop, Rivertown.
Time to bring Zandrina into the pattern.
* * *
“If I hadn’t been listening, if Jerulus hadn’t –”
“You went too far, Sordono. Too far. What did you do to me? To us?”
“I don’t know! How could I know? I had no time to practice, not really – I was only following your –”
“You talked me into this, when I took Herruto’s pendant off! You made this happen!”
“You lost control, Vee. If you can’t see –”
“Don’t call me that!”
“What, then? ‘Tee’?”
“I don’t know!”
“I haven’t… I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that before… Look, I don’t think you understand how serious this is. Take an outsider’s perspective. For once I think you need it, Vee! She wasn’t holding back. She was going to kill you! She had killed you!”
“That’s how we know it worked! Ah, she knew I’d get healed, anyway, probably. Biting out my throat after leaving me on the floor like that, it was calculated… Do you have any idea where she went?”
“There was no way for us to stop her! She just –”
“Why does not one – single – future exist in which you answer the damn question…”
“I… uh… I don’t know for sure –”
“Obviously.”
“There was that place. That place she thought she’d go, when she first got her powers.”
“Oh. Yes. That’s tonight.”
“It was weighing heavy on her mind, for some reason.”
“For some reason? It is the reason. It’s been our purpose these last weeks. It’s the meaning of everything.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“… As little as possible. I’m already doing it, after all.”
* * *
22nd Taura, 999 NE
She reached the corner and turned south, and there, on the next corner in front of her, she was waiting.
The person who was her. The person she would never see coming.
“Hello, me,” she said, approaching closer. It was okay. For all that they stood in the street, there was no one watching, no one listening. They were alone with each other and the dark wind.
“Hello,” the other responded.
“I’ve been busy.”
“So we have.”
She grinned behind the mask. “We indeed,” she said.
“Is there an accord, between us?”
“You sound nervous.”
“Do we need to be?”
That question took her back. Reminded her just who she was talking to.
“Can a double-edged blade be nervous?”
“So you do understand.”
“Pretty hard to see how there wouldn’t be an accord between us. We’re the same, after all, aren’t we?”
“Same epic fashion sense.”
“Same penchant for death.”
“You talk like I used to.”
“Right back at you.”
“We met in the middle.”
“Almost.” She shrugged. “It’s going to be a boatload of fun, though, isn’t it?”
“Deceiving everyone?”
“Certain people in particular. I’m sure Vee has been dying to get to know Timesnatcher better. What a golden opportunity we’ve created ourselves for mischief.”
The other her shrugged, and she could almost feel the motion, so familiar was the movement in every exacting detail.
“We’ll only grow closer, over time. Don’t think we did this just to mess around. We needed Tanra on our side. Ulu Kalar is coming. I’m not wasting her in the next Incursion, once our inkatra opens the door.”
I… am Zandrina…
“Oh,” she mouthed.
The other her laughed, a bland, coarse hack of sound. “Hah! We’re catching on quick! Yes, it’s going to happen – I can’t see how, but it will, it will. The champions… they’ll be brought low. Almost reduced to the last man. Not enough to fight the dragons. And Irimar…” She laughed again. “Yes, we do want to mess with him, a little bit. But you… us… we won’t put ourselves at risk when it happens. The moment we get pressed, we withdraw to the Candles. There’ll be no nets capable of trapping us.”
“Leave the others high and dry?”
“If the alternative is death?” The other her cocked her head. “Every time.”
“Every time,” she repeated.
But the echo was empty. Inside, she knew the truth. She could already see Imrye. Already see that she’d keep the rest of her promises.
Vardae is weak.
She’ll never be like me.
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