Voices spoke of her as if she weren’t there. Someone dripped cold liquid over her face. She hissed as it stung her eyes, but that wasn’t what they wanted. They shook their heads and called her too formed and yet unformed, worse than being born empty.
Somewhere in the roots of the Hive, there lay dozens of deep pits carved out of the bedrock. Water sloshed within; she could see the swell before the faint lights of a figure’s wings. There was a hand over her mouth. Someone tore her struggling wings, still weak and damp with mucus. Ragged edges, bleeding magic. Teeth too weak to bite.
They pushed her in, of course. It always happened that way.
The pool was deep and viscous, not-quite-simmering. It burned and burrowed into her ruined wings. She screamed as she thrashed to stay afloat. The water whorled and sucked her in with its tide of loose spines and bubbling flesh. There were limbs floating around her now—crooked legs, fingerless hands, and bobbing within arm’s reach, the oily globe of an eye.
The figures left, taking their light with them. Everything was melting. She clawed at the slick walls, failed to fly, clung to what might have been half a torso and called feebly for help until she realised she was wasting her strength. She was the only living thing left here. She could feel her body delaminating, joining them. No Archivist to save her this time. The sludge closed over her head. All sound fell away.
Ezphorza woke gasping.
She fumbled for the moss-jar at her side, gripped it with both hands, and gazed into the green glow until she felt herself calm. Then she sat up. She felt too unrested for it to be any later than the soggy hours before dawn. Her head throbbed faintly into the silence. Her fingers twinged with phantom aches. She didn’t want to even look at the weaving rack lurking in the corner of her bower.
Lieutenant Suria had ordered her to assist as best as she could, crafting scraps of base material as she recovered from the effects of being hit by that breaker spell-slip. It was taking so long to feel normal again. She wished she could’ve gone with Silverwater, back to Titania Fauna’s Hive. Iolite didn’t even need any more veilments for now. But duties were duties.
Ezphorza shoved the gentle glow of the moss-jar away, wishing she could steal another half-cycle of sleep—but that wouldn’t be a good idea. Everyone knew nightmares came in shoals. So she crawled free of her nest, shivering, and felt her way to the kitchen. She saw light as she drew near. Maybe Curlew was in there, or Thorn, or maybe that Breaker boy had managed to find her some Hival honey like Winterbird had asked. She hoped it was Winterbird in the kitchen. They’d been so busy, there was no time to talk like before…
She stumbled through the doorway, and it was only Suria. The Lieutenant looked less frightening than usual with her wings folded close to her body. Her hands cupped a bowlful of lichen tea. The amphora sat on the table. Suria’s spines twitched, indicating she smelled her presence. She’d probably known by the time Ezphorza had made it halfway up the hall. Likely it was only a courtesy gesture. Ezphorza cursed herself. It was far too late to leave now.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” she said hesitantly.
Suria didn’t even need to look up. “I thought Iolite set you on a diurnal shift.”
Ah, so her time-estimate hadn’t been wrong. “I woke and thought it was day,” she lied.
“Hmm.” Suria took a sip of her tea. “If you’re already here, there’s no point going back to sleep, is there? Have some waking-food now and try to rest with an early night. Mind the human.”
Ezphorza glanced over as Suria gestured to the corner, startled. What she’d taken for a pile of ragged blankets had a human under them—the fleshcrafter, she realised with a jolt. Somehow, he unnerved her more than the Breaker did.
“Stop worrying,” Suria added, patting the amphora with dry affection. “He’s asleep.”
Ezphorza moved her spines in acknowledgment and hastened to prepare a meal of pickled gorse and dandelion greens.
“You forgot the syrup,” Suria said as she closed the cupboard.
She hesitated. “I thought it’d be best to save it for Saiphenora and the others. Since I’m not helping, outside.”
“Iolite works hard to provide us with an excess.”
Ezphorza’s spines wilted. “Well…yes. But I’ve found that it…doesn’t work with my healing.”
The syrup was too frantic, she thought. Too alchemical, too much. Nothing like what she’d sampled of Hive honey, warm and restorative. She wished she could be sent back to Fauna’s Hive. The fact that she hadn’t meant she was useless there.
“Hmm,” Suria said. She tilted her head and sniffed the air. “Check the powdered grain. At the back of the second cupboard.”
Nobody used flour here, not even the Breaker for whom it had been bought. Ezphorza twitched in puzzlement as she withdrew an empty box—almost empty. A vial rolled against her fingertips as she reached in, the sound muffled…when she plucked it out, she realised it was bound in layers of fabric, for cushioning. Carefully, she unwrapped it. The remaining droplets within were golden and viscous, syrup but not. Even she could tell, just by looking.
“But how did you…if it’s Hival…” she stammered.
“You can have the rest,” Suria grunted. “It’s good for slow healing. But use it sparingly.”
“But,” she started, swishing her tail in agitation. “You said Iolite…? How did this get here?”
“I dressed in a spare veilment, doused myself in floral oils, and entreated a Hival independent under the guise of a human researcher. The result was successful, though not satisfactory. The City Watch is now searching for that alias. Glister Hive would be too, if they weren’t so otherwise occupied.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” Suria echoed. “I’d hoped to acquire more than this pittance. Six cycles of wasted work. Partake of my efforts, Ezphorza.” She gestured at the unconscious human. “Take the human back to its holding chamber once you are done—relax, Iolite’s work is always very fine. Don’t disturb me; I must rest. Weave what you can. We have much work ahead of us.”
Ezphorza lowered her gaze. “My thanks, Lieutenant.”
Suria left, taking the amphora with her.
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Ezphorza stared uneasily down at the human as she ate. Once she was finished, she knocked her hand against the table. When that didn’t wake him, she tapped his shoulder with a spoon.
His eyes snapped open. “Who are you?”
“Follow me,” she said.
He gripped the table’s edge and stood, swaying faintly. For a moment, she feared he might curl his hand into a fist and strike—but no, the enchanted bands still cuffed his wrists. Suria’s trust in Iolite was sound, Ezphorza reminded herself. Iolite was very powerful and very clever. Without her, Ezphorza would have nothing. Be nothing. Sludge recycled into Hival veins, a broken shell put back where it came from, remixed for another go around.
“Don’t you have a name?” the fleshcrafter asked as she led him down the corridor. “Is it true then, that names matter to you people after all?”
What information he was trying to pry from her skull, she didn’t know. “There’s no point asking me questions.”
The honey soothed her mind and tongue and made speaking the human words easier. It wasn’t the same with syrup, she mused sullenly. If only she reacted well to the syrup like Saiphenora did, or even the others, even Suria or Curlew or some of the wingless-but-still-useful back at Fauna’s Hive…
“Really? Then why did they switch you with the one from before? The green one, he had a name. Thorn?”
“Be quiet,” she commanded. The fleshcrafter’s mouth snapped shut.
She took the long, winding route down, avoiding the rooms which she knew contained growing piles of fodder bodies. She was half-tempted to carve out a separate tunnel for herself, but she could already picture Iolite’s bewilderment and scolding. It’d only be a waste of her dwindling strength. So she kept to the out-of-the-way route, trying to find relief in only seeing the stacked barrels of nutrient solution along the way.
Then they rounded a corner and almost ran smack bang into General Saiphenora.
Saiphenora walked with a fodder body behind her. Ezphorza cringed inwardly as she stepped aside to let them pass. Saiph turned to tilt her spines at her. The fodder creature didn’t. It stared straight ahead, every limb and spine held rigid, not so much as a finger out of place.
Saiphenora must have seen her gaze lingering, or smelled some hint of emotion, because she stopped walking.
“I’m just practising,” she said. “It’s harmless.”
“I—I know. Good luck.”
Ezphorza hurried further along the tunnel, curling her wings close. There were so many of the wretched things around. She’d known they were there, of course—she’d helped craft them, back at Fauna’s Hive. She just hadn’t realised how many there were until yesterday, when Iolite had declared it time to remove them from storage. Did they even need this much? Saiphenora couldn’t possibly control all of them at once. Could she?
Empty shells, Ezphorza thought. Just empty shells. And the Titania of Almucantar had deemed her less worthy of life than them.
+++
By the time the faery locked him up again, Zahir was starting to shiver. The leader—Iolite—had given him potions to soften the effects of withdrawal, but it was a small solace. His nausea had eased, but it was still cold. He was so damnably cold. It had never been this cold back in the kingdom.
He leaned against a bit of flaking white wall, facing the far side of the cell. The kingdom, he mused. How useless it all seemed now. Pointless feuds with Dalim and Mahasim, snide remarks against Najm and the like, reading texts and smoothing skin blemishes and fixing crooked teeth, day in, day out…
Was that all seven-odd years of study—could it really be called something so mundane as study?—had earned him? It had been safe, at least. And now, this. He thought of the dungeons and laughed. What irony.
He’d thought, maybe, that there would be an end to it. He’d had this idea—stupid idea, really—to make use of a loophole before it could be closed. If he could expedite the training of a successor, he could retire. Have some peace and quiet for once, be the envy of his colleagues for the correct reasons. The regular apprentices were bound to a flimsy curriculum, and they had other teachers that weren’t him. They wouldn’t have wanted to take on that tradition, that trial by fire, that rumour which was only ever whispered of, no matter what encouraging words he offered or however many chests of coin.
But an apprenticeling…
A desperate apprenticeling might see it as a fair deal. Sanaz had pulled the scheme off with hers, so why couldn’t he? And if he were offering someone a comparatively better life in the meantime, well, there was no harm in that. That kindness, he’d reasoned, would negate the hidden cruelty of it all. But what did it matter now?
He wondered how they were all doing, to whom Hafiz and Isra had been assigned in his absence, whether Jamal would cease study in his grief or persevere like a fool…
…Whether Aliyah had been killed yet.
Iolite said very deliberate things about the Library in front of him, and on the latest of these occasions, the violent one—Suria—had posed a suggestion about finding a replacement for Aliyah. Something about the tracking being too much of a strain. And then an argument had spilled over, words switching from trade tongue to faerie and back again, convenience and loose ends and something about stasis being insufficient, and he hadn’t understood the rest of it.
They wanted something from the Library. Maybe they wanted the entire Library. He’d told them Aliyah would be of no use, and they still refused to believe him. Perhaps the fact that she’d ventured deeper than he had…if only he hadn’t known any details about the zones. He wished she’d never mentioned it to him and wished he hadn’t remembered. But then, the first implication that she’d gone beyond the periphery had been enough for Iolite. Perhaps it would’ve made no difference in the end.
An uncomfortable hypothesis tickled at the edges of his thoughts: magic and meaning and knowledge, old rituals, pound of flesh and a handful of brain, passages opened with blood…
It was too cold. His teeth chattered. A craving surged like spellfire along every vein, icy coals crackling at the base of his skull. Neurons jittered. Little shocks, like lightning on the horizon. But it wasn’t just that. The magic they had him under had cut off his usual processes, the steady reservoir of carefully balanced, endogenous neurochemicals drip-feeding into his brain. It was skewing the equilibrium keeping him otherwise functional. Exhaustion swallowed his thoughts. Were it not for the other withdrawals, he would’ve lain down and slept for as long as they let him.
His eyes itched and his mouth was sand-dry. He scratched at his throat, then forced himself to stop. His hands shook the more he tried to steady them. He thought of the people in their cavern. He wasn’t sure how many it’d been, earlier. Less than the time before, probably. And they weren’t dead, or even harmed, really, but…
It wasn’t right.
And they’d make him do it again. How long ago had it been? An hour or two? There were no timepieces here, no hourglasses. No light save for the feeble glow of a mossy lantern, past the bars and well out of reach. The one called Thorn had placed it there, quite prudently, after Zahir had smashed the first one.
Zahir forced himself to get up and walk closer to the light. He examined the bindings on his wrists. The sections he’d scratched at with a piece of glass from the first lantern had long smoothed back out. Every attempt at using magic got stuck behind those damned cuffs. The one around his throat was more for intent, he guessed. Proximity to the brain. They operated in tandem. Those coils, those veins—what glimpses he could catch—hooked into his nervous system.
Could a spell break this? He wasn’t sure. Suspected not. It’d have to be complicated, or something a Breaker would know. It was a shame then, that the only Breaker available had wishes in direct opposition to his. He hadn’t seen him for a while, come to think of it. Nowadays, it was mostly the one called Thorn stopping by to keep him sane with a flurry of unhelpful chatter. And now even Thorn was gone, leaving him with a new and rather sour-sounding warden.
He sat down and sharpened his hearing. The enchantment allowed that. It was within the bounds of operational efficiency. No footsteps or wingbeats, for now. He pushed up his sleeve and unwound the strip of cloth from his forearm. A glass shard tumbled out, selected for its cleanest looking edge. It wasn’t as nice as a knife, much less a scalpel, but it meant he hadn’t resorted to using scavenged rocks, or his fingernails, or his teeth.
There was a limit to how much injury the enchantment would allow, he’d discovered. Too many wounds loosened him from its hold, so it would force him to heal sooner or later. He also couldn’t deliberately exhaust his inner reserves; the magic seemed to refill as quickly as it was spent. From where, he didn’t know and didn’t especially want to guess. But there was no restriction on inflicting injury, so long as it wasn’t aimed at any of his captors. It made the task difficult, but not impossible.
He drove the point of the shard into his fingertip with a grimace. Funny things, spell-slips. They didn’t have to be written on rune paper. You didn’t need a runequill. They helped a lot, but skin and blood would do.