Wicked Throne, page 26
The Shade grins from ear to ear.
“Don’t do that.”
“The sectumanimus,” he says.
“What’s a sect—?”
“Good luck.” He chuckles and leans back to peer down the tank rows like his friend’s going to catch him talking. “You don’t know what a sectumanimus is. That seems strange, but, oh well.”
“I’ve never heard of one. They’re not blood spirits?”
He waves aside my comment. “You were always interested in taboo magic, but I’ve done reams of study on my own. Well, both of us. That thing and I.”
“The spirit.”
“Sure. We’ve found libraries in riftworlds the empire would murder half of Sangearth to destroy. A sectumanimus is a wizard whose soul has peeled free from its living body. How about that?”
“So, he’s alive? He’s a wizard.”
“Yes. Well, technically. The soul’s conscious and can cast magic without its body, but it’s unstable. It can’t feel pain or get hurt.”
“I noticed.”
“It’s a very rare condition. I’ve only come across one reference to sectumanimi and that was in a book from an old sorcerer’s prison in Silras Kyre. A lot of pain, a lot of fear, and some particularly creative wizards can accidentally detach their consciousness from their bodies. Imagine floating away—and you are. Literally.”
“The ghasts,” I guess. “They captured him after they captured me. I escaped, but he didn’t.” I freed you, the Shade said. “You didn’t want to help him?”
“I was a prisoner at the same time.” He indicates his scars. “He freed me after he got loose. He became a sectumanimus.”
I should have come back and rescued them. I didn’t. I knew they’d captured someone else. He was in the cell next to mine. I escaped and I ran.
I should have saved them.
I should have tried.
Gravity wells under my feet. My life ripples backward—not the life I thought I’d lived. Someone else’s. A stranger’s. Someone worse than me. It’s my fault they sat here and suffered and took it out on Almathea. I left them to die, just like Deercat left me. I could have come back for them. I knew they were suffering, and I chose to save myself instead. I’m no different from Deercat. If I can hate him, they deserve to hate me. Yet the Shade helped—
I scowl. “Wait a minute. You helped me get out. He’d already become a —sectumanimus?”
“Yep.”
“While I was imprisoned?”
The Shade sucks in a breath. “Ah.”
He’s holding something back. He’s not lying, not exactly. Yes, he helped me escape after the other wizard turned into a monster. I repeat, “I have to kill him in order to stop the dragon.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
The Shade groans. “It got out of hand. I wanted—you wanted— Almathea to burn. I wanted to hurt them for what they did to me.”
“You’re from Almathea.”
“In a minute. I wanted to punish them. I wanted the emperor dead.”
“You killed him, didn’t you.”
“And Razanhi. Yes.”
Whatever weird kinship’s trying to creep into my skin, I push it aside.
The Shade says, “I didn’t want to kill everyone. He wants to end everyone’s suffering.”
“By killing them all.”
“You’ve thought about it, too.”
I hesitate. His hands still hang at his sides. I catch myself watching, realize I no longer think he’s going to attack me. Does that make me a bad person, too? His friend? “I thought I was the only one who thought like that. People are so corrupt.” I smile. “The ones who aren’t just suffer at the hands of the ones who’re monsters. I can’t fix it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all dead and the suffering was finished?”
“Yes.”
“No,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “But think if you came back from unimaginable pain to find out you’d become an unstoppable nightmare. Sectumanimi don’t feel hurt. They don’t get tired. They’re magic without limits. A soul without a body to weigh it down. He took that instinct and ran with it.”
“So he’s unstoppable. You said I could kill him.”
“Here’s a creature you can insult but not kill,” quips the Shade, pointing a finger at me in salute. “I thought he would stop eventually. Let’s kill Almathea—but it didn’t stop with Almathea. Let’s kill Bengolet’s whelp, the winter faeries—but it didn’t stop with him. I don’t suppose you finished off Grastes Bengoletson for us?”
“I like King Grastes.”
“No. Really?” He snickers. “Ivar, the hero of Eorha?”
“That’s right. I had a speech, and everything.”
“You make me sick.”
“Evidently, I’m leading a revolt in Gadran Vei, too. Feeling’s mutual.”
“That’s not you. That’s the sectumanimus.”
“Oh. Good.” I lean forward, let him really look me in the face. “I’m a loyal Imperial agent.”
“That’s weird.”
“You know he’s not going to lead anyone anywhere if the dragon kills them all.”
“Ergo.” He spreads his hands to encompass our chat.
“How do I kill a sectumanimus?”
The Shade looks around. “You know he’s stronger than you are, right? You have to kill his body. The first thing he did after enslaving the Hive was transform his body and hide it. So long as it lives, he’ll live.”
“Transformed it. Into what?”
“I don’t know.”
“So helpful,” I grumble.
“I am. Listen, it’s probably on Vorsmad somewhere. I’d go myself, but if he catches me trying to run, he’ll kill me. I’m already on thin ice: I scared off a potential ally he was trying to recruit. Some magic-sensitive wretch collecting trinkets in the ruins of Vorsmad. The scrounger thought it would be a hero and rescue the Imperial agents we were holding captive nearby. I made sure he wanted nothing to do with me or the sectumanimus.” His mask wrinkles over a winning smile. “I scared him away.”
So you did.
The Shade says, “You remember what Razanhi’s Ash Womb is, right?”
I laugh. “Yeah.”
“Good. It’s in the pyramid across the plaza, if you want to use it to get to Vorsmad.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
No wonder he seems so familiar. He’s me. I know what it feels like to serve someone bad, doing your job because you don’t know what else to do or maybe you’re just too lazy to fight back. I know the wrenching panic that wakes you up at night, and the peace that comes with letting go of all hope for redemption. How many lives have I ruined in the emperor’s name? Spying on his enemies. Betraying people who thought I was their friend. Looking away when the Black Tower Guard came busting down the doors to break my friends’ hands so they couldn’t do unsanctioned magic or execute their rebel cell. “Nab’s corpse, I am the face of Resistance. Ivar, saving the day.”
“Shut up,” he says.
I don’t know why, he doesn’t deserve it—maybe that’s why, because I don’t deserve it either—but I want to help him. “Listen. I’m sure bad things will happen if he learns you’ve betrayed him.”
The Shade looks down.
I take a breath. “Come with me.”
“Ohh, no.”
I spread my hands. “Any place has got to be better than here.”
He leans backward. Shakes his head. “There’s nothing I want in the outside. Well—” His wistful sigh makes me think about lovelorn fools, but I can’t fit love together with the scarred man in the mask.
Something’s wrong. The prickling sensation eats at my consciousness, but I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from.
He deflates. “That’s over with. Well—no. No, it’s done. So. You’re right. Either way, I lose. May I ask you for a favor? Scoundrel to scoundrel?”
“What is it?”
The Shade wrings his hands together. “Listen, I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but I want you to follow through with your instinct. Make it stop.”
“I’m not letting the dragon—”
He holds out a palm. “Me. Make this go away,” he growls, hoarse voice darkening, forced into a gurgle more animal than fae.
“I’ll kill the sectumanimus if I can.”
“No. Well—yes. I mean, kill me.” Silence. The bright air swells larger. “Make it stop,” says the Shade.
The dust on my skin. The acid. The Silence stretches over itself.
“For God’s sake! This isn’t squeamishness on my behalf?” he shouts. “And how many lives have you ruined, people who didn’t want to die? Through negligence? Through sabotage, spying for the empire? Imperial dog!”
For helping me, the sectumanimus will kill him. Yes, that’s certain. If he won’t come with me and he won’t escape himself, the undead wizard’s going to kill him. Not in a pleasant way.
“Raise your hand,” he says, like a priest. “I forgive you.”
He’s dead either way. He killed Momaggos. Well, to hell with Momaggos. He helped bomb Almathea. I raise my casting hand, palm out.
The Shade wipes his hands on his thighs. He inhales a sharp breath, and the cloth mask sticks to his nostrils and lips like he’s telling himself things —God knows what.
“Tell me your name,” I say. “I’ll pray for you.” He snorts. “Fine. I’ll forget you. I can’t keep calling you the Shade in my head.”
“The Shade,” he repeats, trying it on. “You’re not going to like it. I think this’ll go easier on you if you just do it and then go kill the sectumanimus. Don’t ask him what his name is, either. Trust me.”
That’s not foreboding.
“Okay?” he says.
“I’ve hunted you across Sangearth. I deserve to know your name.”
“Forget it.”
“Tell me.”
The Shade wags his head: For shame. He puts on a big smile. “I’m Ivar de Ryeleth.”
“We’re all secretly Ivar at heart. Anywhere someone resists tyranny, they’re Ivar, too.” That sounds so stupid, I roll my eyes. It’s not my fault.
Still smiling, the Shade hooks his fingers under the white cloth mask and peels it from his face. Shiny pink-gold scars fry his skin from neck to hairline. His one whole, healthy blue eye narrows into a slit in anticipation, and he raises his auburn eyebrow.
That color—the same red brown, the same blue eye from the thaumograph Ygraine showed me, the same eye looking back like a mirror, the same soft, androgynous jaw, although his is melted pink-gold wax running and frozen shiny, and the same face from the thaumograph, my face, run through fire and spat out like a fun-house mirror.
I edge away from him and trip over the tissue-cloning case.
“Does it frighten you?” he says. “It frightens me a little.”
The other Ivar de Ryeleth takes a deep breath, smiles, and exhales. “We had a deal?”
25
EOLITH COMES BACK AS I’m stuffing an unconscious goblin into an empty crate. “What happened?” he says.
“Nothing.” I shut the lid and check the seal to make sure he doesn’t suffocate. “I found the Ash Womb. It’s in a pyramid across the plaza.”
“Great. Getting there’s gonna be an issue. This ooze on the floor goes to a waste chute about sixty feet northeast. We can drop down to get outside the building, but there’s a lot of ghasts surrounding us.” He wets his lips. “Too many.”
“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say. So what if the other Ivar and his buddy were already free when he rescued me; when I ran away, I thought I was abandoning them to die. Everything I hated Deercat for doing, I did to them.
We’re both despicable. We’re both unforgivable.
Wait a minute—if the other Ivar rescued me, how could he have already been free? What did he rescue me from?
The naked, scarified goblin in the shower appears in my head. His white skin like my white skin, worn pink by the belt lashing his ankles upside down. I’d thought he looked like my dam. Nab in a bucket, what if he was another one? Another me?
What if the sectumanimus escaped, freed the other Ivar, and meant to sacrifice me? My real blood’s got to be a lot more potent than the other Ivar’s fake magic blood. But the other Ivar let me go, and they had to grow a new one from him. To sacrifice.
I bought the world three months by running away.
“Sir,” Eolith says. “Can you use magic to disguise us?”
“No. I can disguise you as a ghast, though.” I go to the stainless-steel table and heft large, ugly-looking pliers. I march to the tank where half a deer floats in terminal sleep, and smash the steel head into the glass. Pink solution cascades across the cavern floor. “You know how to skin a kill, Captain?”
“Yeah,” he says, eyeballing me.
“Thank you, thank you—great. Start skinning this; I’m going to find more large animals. I’ll spell them together when I get back. The idea’s to cover you up, not make you look fashionable.”
“Yeah. . . .” He squints. “What are you planning to do?”
“Impersonate the man impersonating me.” I head left, searching the bubbling horrors for another deer or a bear. Owls, bats, rabbits, foxes, and a dozen misshapen things that haven’t fully developed. The other Ivar grew in a glass tank. The other Ivar slept in pink solution. I shake my head. The sacrifice grew in a tank, too. They pulled him out and cut his throat.
I kick aside spare cables, yank up a tarp along the wall, but the tanks underneath are empty. I shove monitoring scopes off a box freezer and fling the lid back. Stacked chocolate ice-cream bars. What the hell? Why do they have that many chocolate ice-cream bars? I slam the lid hard enough to rattle my bones through the floor and search the next ten rows. Here’s a gold bear. I bust its tank and heave the soggy metallic fur back to Eolith.
Searching the cavern’s right side, I find small animals, already-harvested animals, bones, rusting wires, and twenty ice-cream wrappers shoved into a bull’s-eye-shaped monitoring scope. Wow. That’s got to be either the other me or the sectumanimus. I have no words.
Above a trash heap behind a broken tank, someone’s strung fifteen small pelts from plastine hoses bolted to the rock ceiling. I tear them down and shove them under my arm. Two green vats offer up pink slime—which I hate myself for sniffing—and a tank thrown sideways against the floor contains nothing but burned-out mechanics and a warped probe arm like the one housing someone’s sugar addiction. This probe evidently malfunctioned as its sharp bull’s-eye aperture’s thrusting halfway into the tank, ready to eviscerate whatever creature lived inside.
I’m drowning.
Deep breaths. Slow breaths. I’m not drowning.
Some fog shifts in my head. My body moves without conscious will. I drop the pelts and pull up my right sleeve to look at the bull’s-eye mark gouged into my forearm.
My mark’s the same size as the aperture. Right there, dug into my skin two inches below the elbow. I’m just seeing it wrong, I know I am. It’s not the same size as the tank’s probe. It’s even the wrong shape: two concentric circles. But the aperture’s two concentric circles also. I squint harder, trying to look past whatever’s going wrong in my eyes or my head between that scar I don’t remember and the tank probe.
The cavern goes gray. Hot knife across my throat. The lights blur. He rescued me. He bought the world three months. He made the original grow another clone.
I slap a palm over my forearm, blotting out the mark. I can’t see straight. My head’s soup.
Take a breath. I rake in a breath around clenched teeth. Count to ten. I start counting, but the numbers evaporate when I try to follow them. I start over twice. The room goes gray, and when it comes back into focus, I hear the word “nine” appearing in my head, and ten comes after nine, but I don’t know if I’ve skipped any or all of them.
I pick up the pelts and go to Captain Howlson, who’s separating tissue with an admirably blank look on his face. I patch together a blanket from the miscarried things, and we lever the bulk up over his head.
“How’s this look?” he says, voice muffled by someone else’s teeth.
“Eesh. You don’t look like a ghast so much as a meat puppet. But you don’t look like a winter faerie, either. Can you see?”
“No. If I stopped breathing, I’d be much happier.”
“Yeah, let’s try that.”
“What?” he says.
“Kidding. Stay here. I’m going to glamour on my disguise.” I open the crate with my back between him and the contents. The other Ivar’s lighter than I thought I’d be, but untangling him from his clothes without his help is frustrating work that leaves me light-headed and with a slimy feeling in my stomach like I’m doing someone wrong. I throw his stiff black cloak around my shoulders and tie up the front. The cloth’s old and tacky. The armpits and back smell, but his scent’s unfamiliar to my nostrils. Not my scent. I pull his mask over my face, and my nose closes up from breathing his mouth scents. Cold saliva wells on my tongue. My skin crawls. I tamp down the oozing nausea rising in my gut and focus on adjusting his eyeholes so I can see.
“Okay,” I tell Captain Howlson. “Shall we?”
He leads me across the cavern. The waste troughs funnel their contents into a steel grate set low in the wall behind the garbage heap. The chute looks big enough to accommodate a grown woman but not Captain Howlson. He slugs off his terrible ghast costume anyway and uses a skinning knife to unscrew the bolts. Eolith levers out the grate and sets it to one side. He wads his costume into the chute and tucks his shoulders in until, with his arms wrapped across his chest so tight his hands meet behind his neck, he squirms into the gap. He disappears.
Nab on a cracker, I hope he’s okay.
I shift sexes and follow him. The drops stretches my eyeballs past my feet. I yell and then splash into jigging ground that entombs me in white. Cold, damp slime crushes me under itself. I claw for the surface. My palms sink into the goo, and the white ooze splits apart, splintering and wiggling. The fig smell burns my lungs. I sneeze. My eyes water. I thrust my head above the surface and gag.
