The Empire's Ruin, page 81
Fight, she told herself. Keep fighting.
The words had seemed sane when Kiel first spoke them, outside, under the wide bowl of the sky. In the cramped space of the stairwell, however, she began to forget what she was supposed to be fighting. There were people below. She could still hear their voices, echoing faintly off the stone. They claimed to be her friends, but people claimed all kinds of things. There were four of them, all armed, but none of them were Kettral, none of them were … whatever she was becoming.
She pictured them one at a time.
Cho Lu was strong, fast, but reckless. Pattick would hesitate at the wrong moment. Dhar was old. Rat just a child …
The girl’s face filled her mind—wide eyes, bared teeth, riot of filthy hair.
The vision dragged her momentarily back to herself.
“You have to kill me,” she said quietly.
Kiel didn’t pause in his ascent.
She could feel the sweat bathing her face, feel herself shaking as though with fever. Her hands had ached first for her blades, then to take the historian’s throat, to squeeze it until his lips purpled and eyes bulged, until he stopped breathing.
“If we don’t find it,” she rasped. “If the cure’s not here, you have to kill me.”
He nodded. “I will do what needs doing.”
She seized him by the shoulder. She hadn’t meant to do that. Slowly, painfully, she loosened her fingers. “You don’t understand. If you don’t kill me soon, you won’t be able to kill me.”
“I do understand,” the historian replied. He gestured up the stairs. “It is not far now.”
They reached a landing after what seemed like an age.
Kiel sang their way through a second door—new notes this time, but the same, strange, tripartite structure, the same breath that seemed to extend beyond all mortal possibility.
The corridor beyond was wider than the one far below, and opened on either side into rooms. Gwenna slipped her belt knife free of its sheath, then glanced over at the historian. He nodded, hefted his spear, and side by side they proceeded down the passageway.
When they reached the first door—gleaming metal, bright as new-polished steel—Gwenna paused just outside, back to the wall.
“Not here,” Kiel murmured, pointing down the passage. “Farther on.”
She hesitated. The smart move would be to clear the rooms as they passed them, to make sure nothing was lurking inside, waiting to strike them from behind. The only smells, though—aside from the stone and something that might have been polished steel—were her and Kiel. All she heard were their two hearts, his slow, measured, hers hammering out a mad, galloping beat. Whatever might be lying in wait, it wasn’t as dangerous as the thing she was becoming.
They passed five more doors, all the same bright metal, all closed and windowless. It felt like exploring a prison, only prisons tended to be darker, damper, filled with rust and filth. This place—the Blind, Kiel had called it—was perfectly empty, scrupulously clean, as though someone had swept and dusted and polished the long corridor that very morning. The same silver-blue light filtered down through the not-glass panes set into the ceiling above, illuminating the hallway. It should have been a relief, not having to carry torches or jump at every shadow. Instead, Gwenna found herself baring her teeth, overgripping her sword.
Finally Kiel paused before another door, slid his fingers into a gearlike mechanism set flush into the metal.
“A lock?” she asked.
He nodded, turning it slowly. There was a sound of metal sliding over stone, then a faint puff of air. The door swung fractionally out.
She took a deep, ragged breath. “All right.”
He nodded. “All right.”
Sword in one hand, belt knife in the other, she slipped into the room.
Her first thought, exploding like a starshatter in her mind, was that she’d been wrong. Wrong about what she’d smelled. Wrong about what she’d heard. Wrong in her assessment of the Blind’s security. The place wasn’t empty at all. It wasn’t safe. It was crawling with spiderlike horrors. They crouched on the rows of gleaming metal tables, their slender, awfully jointed arms as long as her own. Some looked ready to spring. Others seemed to be reaching for her already, legs tipped with razor claws.
She retreated a step, blades raised, blood blazing in her veins. Instead of giving chase, however, they remained perched there, motionless, as though frozen in the moment of their unfolding. And then, a moment later, she saw that they weren’t gabhya at all. The long articulated legs weren’t made of chitin, but steel—or whatever passed for steel inside the Blind—and they weren’t sitting atop those shining tables, they were a part of them, each arm curling up from beneath the flat surface.
“They are harmless,” Kiel said, stepping into the room behind her. “Just old tools.”
They didn’t look old and they sure as shit didn’t look like any tools she’d ever seen, although some of the arms were tipped with knives, others with what looked to be pliers or pins or lenses.
“Tools for what?” Gwenna growled, trying to calm her heart’s mad gallop as she stared.
The tables were all bolted to the floor, each about waist-height and large enough for a very tall man to lie down comfortably on top. Comfortably, that was, provided the tall man in question didn’t mind lying on cold metal.
“For research,” the historian replied.
He crossed to a wall of glass-and-steel cabinets, shelves, drawers. Some of those shelves were empty, others held delicate vessels of strange shapes, too small to bother drinking from. More tools hung from rows of hooks—shears, razors, metal rules, incremental markings scribed on their surface.
Kiel ignored it all. Instead, he flipped the latch of a cabinet with gnarled fingers. More drawers, each one just a few fingers deep, stood inside. They whispered as he pulled them out, then replaced them, one after the next. Gwenna caught a glimpse of a bundle of something that looked like silk or muslin; some feathered instrument, or perhaps an actual feather; a pair of golden frames, each as large as her hand; more lenses; a slender glass tube, closed on both ends, with a silver liquid flashing inside. She recognized none of it. The strangeness made her wary, then angry.
Trembling with the effort, she placed her sword and knife on one of the metal tables, then stepped carefully away. She didn’t want to be holding them when the full weight of her rage swept over her.
Kiel’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Here,” he said, lifting something from the lowest drawer.
She squinted. “A ring?”
He nodded, then tossed it to her.
Her hand snatched it reflexively from the air. It was cold, freezing cold, like a shard of ice carved from a glacier. The cold drained into her fingers, spread through her palm. She expected numbness to come with it, but there was no numbness, only a deep bleeding ache.
“Put it on.”
“This is the cure?” she asked, studying the ring. It was black, lacquer-smooth, twisted in a way that hurt the brain to look at, as though it had too many sides, too many curves.
Half of her didn’t want a cure. Maybe more than half.
“For Rat’s sake,” the historian said quietly, “put it on.”
Gwenna slid it over the middle finger of her left hand.
Then she collapsed.
In a vague, distant way, she could feel the stone floor pressed against her cheek, her hair in her face, the edge of her belt digging into her side. Eclipsing those sensations, however, blotting them out almost entirely, was the polar cold sweeping through her flesh, pouring through her veins, crashing like a great wave into the poison’s fire. That fire blazed at the touch, flared into perfect, excruciating pain. Screams flooded her ears, furious, horrible screams that she recognized only after a very long time as her own. She tried to writhe free, to escape, but the violence was inside her, a war between the poison of the gabhya and the awful cold of the Csestriim ring.
A vision swept over her. She was standing on a high mountain, thigh-deep in snow. Wind carved into her skin, but she was standing inside a fire, a fire high as any tower. The roar of it filled her ears. She could feel her skin melting, her eyes turning to slag in their sockets as her bones cracked with the cold. She was dying, that much was obvious, but whether it was the fire killing her or the ice, she couldn’t say. The world dropped away in cliffs on every side. There was nowhere to flee, nothing to do but feel her frozen flesh slough off, feel all the strong bones of her body turn to ice, listen to the wind keening across the sky, stare blindly into the heart of her own annihilation. It seemed the battle between ice and fire would last forever, but slowly, slowly the flames flickered, guttered, fell, then went out.
She stood alone, naked, on the mountain’s top.
The ice in her veins faded from a razor purity to a deep, awful ache.
She opened her eyes. Kiel knelt beside her, studying her with that gray gaze.
“That was a near thing,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“This…” she began, trailed off shuddering, then tried again. “This is supposed to be a fucking cure?”
He shook his head. “There is no cure for the poison inside you. Think of this as … a counterweight.”
She stared at him a moment, then let her head drop back against the stone. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It balances the toxin.”
“It fucking hurts.”
He nodded.
“When does that part stop?”
“Never.”
She stared at the gray stone of the ceiling, the perfect angles, the light draining down through the Csestriim substance that wasn’t glass.
“Never,” she repeated. Her voice sounded distant, dull.
“There is no driving out the poison of the gabhya’s bite. It is only with great force that the matzcel holds it at bay.”
Gwenna raised her hand weakly, studied the ring. The black had shifted to deep, shadowy red, but it still looked … wrong.
“The matzcel? You couldn’t just call it a ring?”
“It is not a ring, not any more than a mask is a face.”
“A face is alive.”
“As is the matzcel, at least in a manner of speaking. The poison inside you will shift and change. This”—he touched the ring with a single, gnarled finger—“will change with it. It will protect you.”
“If it’s protecting me, why does it hurt so much?”
Her body felt carved out, her limbs unstrung.
“A violence is unfolding inside you. A war. All wars have a cost.” The historian studied her. “Can you bear it?”
She shoved herself up to her elbows, then rose slowly to her feet. Her body hurt, but not with the pain of any actual injury. Gingerly, she tested her range of motion—uncompromised. The truth was, she’d had worse after a nasty training session, but that pain had always been temporary.…
“It never goes away?” she asked.
“It will ebb and flood. Some days will be better than others, but no. As long as you wear that ring, the pain will be with you.”
“And if I take it off?”
He met her gaze without responding.
She straightened her back, cracked her knuckles, nodded. “I guess I’d better get used to it, then.” Before the historian could reply, she turned away, reclaimed her knife and blades from the table.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It is a laboratory.”
The answer twisted something in her gut. Or maybe that was the ring. Or the poison. She had no idea, but looking around, talking—it gave her something to focus on other than the pain.
“What’s a laboratory doing inside a fortress? Or a hunter’s blind, for that matter?”
“To hunt a creature, to defeat it,” Kiel replied, “one must first understand it.”
The room was long and wide. To Gwenna’s surprise, a bank of windows—angled halfway between vertical and horizontal—lined the wall.
“Didn’t see those from outside.”
“The angle keeps them invisible from below.”
“And what keeps them from breaking? If this place is as old as you say, they should have shattered ten thousand times over.”
“Science,” Kiel replied vaguely.
She turned her attention back to the nearest table, ran a finger along the smooth metal. It remained utterly unspotted by rust.
“You’re telling me these are thousands of years old, too?”
“Many thousands.”
“I guess the Csestriim knew how to make better steel than we do.”
“They did. But this is not steel.”
Beneath the tables hung racks with various glass jars and vials, trays of instruments made for plying, cutting, sawing, all forged of the same unspotted metal. Gwenna picked up a short knife, found it almost feather-light in her fingers.
“I take it the Csestriim posted here weren’t just soldiers.”
“The youngest of the Csestriim lived thousands of years. None of them devoted all those millennia exclusively to war.” He paused. “Almost none.”
“So the ones at this fort spent half their time outside hunting Nevariim. And half of it down here—” Understanding settled over her like a cold, leaden coat. “Cutting them apart.”
“They had a hunger for knowledge.”
Gwenna spun the short knife between her fingers, then set it on the nearest table. Grooves ran down the center and the edges of the surface, as though to drain some liquid through a series of small holes set in the end. “And not,” she concluded grimly, “the kind of knowledge you find only in books.”
“Where do you think the knowledge in the books comes from?”
“You talk as though you admire them.”
The historian didn’t respond. Gwenna turned to find him gazing once more across the empty space. His eyes, though not so reflective, were almost the same color as the steel. It wasn’t clear what he was looking at, if anything.
“They were an interesting race,” he said finally.
“If you think genocidal monsters are interesting.”
“All creatures have the capacity to become monsters.”
“I suppose we didn’t hold back when it was our turn to slaughter them.”
“No,” the historian replied, still staring at nothing. “We did not.”
Gwenna watched him a moment longer through narrowed eyes, then turned away, stomach churning. She crossed to the metal cabinets.
“What else is in here?”
“I’m not certain.”
“You knew about the…” She glanced down at the ring. “The matzcel.”
“Deduction. Extrapolation.”
“Care to extrapolate some more?”
“There is no need when we can look.”
“If I open the others, is something going to leap out at me or explode in my face?”
“Unlikely.”
She stepped well to one side anyway, flicked open the nearest latch with the tip of her knife.
The door swung slowly open, hinges so silent they might have been oiled that morning.
Nothing exploded.
Nothing leapt into her face.
Inside, more shelves. More flasks and bottles. More very sharp implements, a truly baffling array of shapes and sizes. She could probably have sold any one of them for a small fortune in an Annurian market. None were longer than her hand. She gazed at the cutting tools a moment, tried to imagine what each was for—flaying back the skin? Sawing through bone?—then turned to the next cabinet.
She opened the door to find a skull staring back at her.
She studied it for a few heartbeats, then reached in, hooked a finger through an eye socket, and lifted it out. She’d spent months learning human anatomy as a cadet. She’d handled dozens of skulls. This one, however, seemed heavier, sturdier. The teeth set into the jaw showed no sign of chipping, decay, or discoloration. They were sharper, too, as though for tearing and rending meat. It didn’t feel so much like a real skull as it did the sculpture of a skull, carved from some material whiter, harder, cleaner, better than mere bone.
“A model?”
“Nevariim.”
She shook her head. “Not a chance. I’ve handled old bones. They’re brown and brittle. This”—she rapped it across the crown with her knife—“is strong as steel.”
“As I have told you, the Nevariim looked like us but they were not us. They were faster and stronger. Their frames were made to accommodate that strength.” He extended a hand.
Gwenna passed him the skull. The historian held it in his palm a moment, gazing into the eyes, then turned and hurled it against the wall. Gwenna took a step back, half raised a hand to shield her eyes, but instead of shattering, the skull bounced off the stone with a solid, hollow clunk, rebounded, and landed half a dozen paces away, where it spun on a wobbly axis then came slowly to rest.
She picked it up, studied it for cracks, nicks, any sign of damage at all, but the dome remained smooth as marble.
“You want me to believe this is real,” she said, looking from the empty eyes to the historian.
“My desires are beside the point. The skull is real, as were the Nevariim. That is why the Csestriim built this place.”
In the next chamber, instead of long metal tables, they found a single stone slab at waist-height, the whole surface polished to a high sheen. When bent over the thing, she could see her face reflected—filthy, haggard, sunburned, flecked with blood. She stepped back. Chains were set into the stone every few feet. From some of those hung manacles.
“I guess this is where they took care of the torture.”
“The Csestriim did not torture, not in the way humans practice it.”
“Then why bother with all the chains?”
“They were trying to understand their foe. They needed to know what would harm the Nevariim, what would slow or confuse them.”
“So they experimented on the live ones in here,” she said, then jerked a thumb back the way they had come, “and when they experimented a little too hard, they took apart the bodies back there.” She shook her head. “This place isn’t a blind. It’s a slaughterhouse.”
