The helm of midnight, p.19
The Helm of Midnight, page 19
“Where is it?” he asked darkly, voice gruff. “Where is this evidence? If it exists, I will find it.”
If an organ is removed, or a hand, does it not leave a scar? When there is a cut, blood flows. The evidence is in your very bodies. But, alas, I cannot see exactly where, cannot sense how the scars of your lost pneuma might manifest. This is something I need you to discover.
“But I have looked in many bodies, taken them apart at the joints, plucked the network of veins from their muscles without severing a single one. I, of all people, have looked. I have never seen—”
Does blood not solidify in the dead? Does the bile not dry up and flake away? Do the intestines not expel their contents, and all evidence of breath fade away? There are things about humans you simply cannot learn from their corpses. You must search in the living. This is why your task is a sad one. It requires … sacrifice.
“You cannot tear open a man and hope to keep him alive for such a search.”
Precisely.
A great, hot anger suddenly erupted in Charbon’s chest as he realized exactly what task he was being set. He threw Matisse and Fiona off—both who’d thought him subdued and had loosened their grip. He stood tall, strode toward the Thalo puppet that had first been with him. “You’re suggesting that the way to save humanity is to murder?” he spat in its face. The puppet did not flinch.
Yes.
“I won’t do it. I will not.”
Then other children will die. Other babies, like your boy, will lose my protection and their magic. You can do something about it. If someone before you had possessed your skills, your knowledge, your ability to uncover this conspiracy, your son might still be alive.
Fiona laid a hand on his shoulder, and he brushed it off. “Louis,” she said. “It is not an evil thing being asked of us. You must do the digging, and we must do the examining. When you find the scars, we will analyze them. It is unseemly, but think of the good it will—”
“No. No.”
Your heart is still too heavy. Soon the grief will harden, and you will see. Sleep now. Return home. In time you will become the Unknown’s servant, just as you’ve always claimed to be.
The puppets held out their hands, and a cold blue glow emanated from each of their palms. Charbon’s head grew light, his feet heavy, and he teetered where he stood.
As he fell and the world swayed, his thoughts and emotions were a jumbled mess of wrongness, and he could not string together how the life he’d led had brought him to such a place in space and time.
16
MELANIE
Two years previous
One moment Melanie had been fighting the torturous rift in her mind, struggling to plunge herself into the fire. And the next she was in Leiwood’s lap, his arms wrapped tightly around her, holding her close. The mask no longer covered her face.
“It’s gone,” she said, amazed. Leiwood smiled a sad, scared smile, and her heart dropped through her stomach. “I’m sorry.” She felt like slime. What had she done? “I couldn’t—I—”
He rocked her back and forth. “Shh. It’s all right.”
With his thumb he wiped away a drop of blood from her forehead. How had that gotten there? She stared at the smear for a long moment. Did I black out?
There was a quick, sharp tap on her forehead, and then another. He was crying. “I didn’t know,” he said. “My mother took me away when I was ten. I didn’t come back until he was gone. He hurt a lot of people, but Master Belladino’s daughter … I didn’t know.” His arms suddenly tensed around Melanie. “And your mother. Your poor mother.”
Melanie began to cry herself, and the tears burned as though they were molten. The idea that something had happened and she couldn’t remember it was frightening, but the thought of her mother sent her over the edge. The solution in the crucible had to cure, but then what? The next steps had been lost with the—
But no. She thought hard, and found she knew the process. And it was not fading; it was strong and clear in her mind.
How—?
Yes, there were more formulas in her memory, more healing potions and techniques. She was almost sure she knew them all. But the anger and hatred had fluttered away. All that was left was knowledge.
“I can still save her,” she whispered. “But why do I still know how?”
“Perhaps when I pricked you…” he started, then took a shaky breath. “I took the poison out, but maybe I locked some things in, too.”
She didn’t understand, but the joy at realizing her mother could be saved shoved the curiosity aside. “She’ll be all right. Leiwood—” He looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t resist hard enough. I should have kept him back. There was more I should have done.”
“No.” He smiled. “It’s not your fault. It was Belladino’s mask.”
They sat locked in silence for a long while. Melanie let relief, and sadness, terror, calm, and happiness flood through her freely.
Eventually Leiwood helped her stand. “We need to get you to a healer.” He gazed mournfully at her ruined hand. She hadn’t even noticed it.
“I can do it myself,” she said firmly. “I know how.” She smiled, and flexed the seared fingers despite the pain. “I know how.” She had a gift now—a master healer’s knowledge and all the long years of life to improve upon it. She’d always been a helper, devoting her life to her ailing parents. But they hadn’t sucked away her time—they’d enriched it. “And I know what to do with my life. I can share Master Belladino’s genius with the world. Just the brilliance. Hopefully his loathing is gone forever.”
Leiwood glanced over to the syringe on the floor, but didn’t say anything.
She hugged him close. “There are so many people I could help. Not just in my village, but perhaps the city as well. The muscle illness doesn’t have to claim more time. I’ll make sure people don’t have to spend their lives being sick.”
He nodded. “Because real time is worth more than bottled time.”
Melanie’s heart fluttered. “Life is always worth more when it’s lived.”
* * *
He helped bandage her hand.
She saw to the spot of blood on her forehead.
They locked the syringe and the mask in a small trunk.
He told her how he’d rid her mind of Belladino’s smog.
And then they’d said little else the rest of the night.
Melanie worked diligently, letting the mixture cure before taking it over to the brazier to bring it to a boil.
Hours passed.
Morning light dripped through the city, bathing the room’s windows, making them glow.
When the linctus was ready, it didn’t smell foul. For some reason, Melanie had always thought that a proper, effective medicine was supposed to smell like death and taste worse. She sniffed the concoction three separate times to be sure Belladino’s know-how indicated it did indeed carry a sweet scent as it was supposed to.
She carefully portioned it out into seven vials, stoppered them good and tight. After the first full dose, her mother would need to consume a few drops with food every day for the next six months. Longer, if it didn’t take to her humors like it should—if Melanie had miscalculated or forgotten something about her mother’s decline.
She looked over to where Leiwood sat on his bed, reading. Then at the chest.
She still needed the syringe.
Fidgeting with her hands, she chanced another furtive glance at him, feeling like no apology could ever make up for what she’d said and done under the mask’s influence. And, given the way she’d abused him, she wouldn’t have been hurt had he treated her with distance or even a little disdain. But, strangely, when she cleared her throat to entreat his attention and he glanced her way, he didn’t seem to regard her any differently.
He closed the book he’d been reading; On Wildflowers the cover said. “What is it?”
“It’s ready.”
“Will it work?”
“Awful mess to go through if it doesn’t,” she said—a half-hearted attempt at a joke. “But I … most of the medicine will be administered orally, over a long period of time. But the first dose needs to be injected. Deep. With precision. After spending an hour inside enchanted glass.”
“That’s why you took the syringe in the first place.”
She nodded.
“So dealing with that”—he nodded at the box, implying all the horrors it contained—“can’t wait.”
He slipped off the bed. Together, they tentatively approached the trunk, as though it had teeth. In a way, it did.
“Can we … put it back in?” she asked. “The echo, or whatever it’s called? Just inject it back into the mask?”
“We can try,” he said, cautiously running his palm across the trunk lid before lifting it. He opened the box slowly, and the hinges let out a grating whine. “But I don’t … I don’t understand how I took it out. I’m no enchanter.”
Melanie understood even less. Magic was a strange, foreign thing. Something she’d hardly ever envisioned encountering, let alone manipulating.
In the gentle dawn lighting, the mask looked innocent. An ugly scrape now marred the frog’s paint, revealing the bare wood beneath, but other than that it looked no different than it had hanging in the mask shop. Still, the sight of it sent a wave of nausea through her gut.
Next to it, the syringe lay glistening. The barrel looked empty. If she hadn’t lived through it, she never would have been able to guess that a monstrous swirl of personality and memory lay within.
With shaking fingers, Melanie reached for the mask. She came within centimeters, but found she couldn’t make herself touch it. Distress burgeoned in her chest, the swell of it stealing her breath, closing off her throat. Instinctually, she reeled back again. “I can’t,” she gasped apologetically.
“It’s all right,” Leiwood soothed, taking her by the hand. He rubbed a small circle into her back. “I couldn’t look at the crow for months after. I’ll do it, it’s all right.”
“After what I did to you—said to you—I shouldn’t ask anything else of you, I shouldn’t—”
“Shh. I’m the one who inserted myself into your business. Trust I can decide for myself when too much is too much.” He drew both items out.
They looked so innocent. Artisanal and beautiful.
Leiwood tossed the mask on the bed, then took the syringe closer to the window, holding the barrel up to the sunlight, letting the glass fracture the beams into rainbows. “I saw things, when I released the time,” he said. “Like there’s the world as we see it … and then there’s the world as the gods see it. It reminded me…” He trailed off.
“Reminded you of what?”
“Reminded me that these things need to be respected. Magic isn’t ours, not really. We don’t make it, we don’t control it. We harvest it and refine it and pretend to master it. But it’s a feral power that wants to turn on us.”
“It’s a gift…” she said softly.
He glanced at her. “You still believe that?”
She ran her uninjured hand over her brow. “I don’t know.”
Having either seen or failed to see whatever he was looking for in the barrel, he returned to the mask, his movements harsh. Running his thumb over the wood, he searched for the place he’d punctured before—but the balsa was soft and the paint detailed. It was difficult to find where the grain had parted.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he reminded her, poising the needle.
Before she could think of a helpful reply, he pressed on, thumbing the plunger down, pressing the metal tip into the carving.
All the air was sucked suddenly—violently—into the center of the room, toward the syringe. It was a great inhale that pulled at their clothes and the curtains. It made the lamps flare and the walls groan.
A gasping silence rang in Melanie’s ears.
They both reeled back in horror, clutching at their throats, their mouths, their noses.
The pressure, the suction, threatened to collapse their lungs.
And then that same air blew back at them, away from the mask with all the force of a winter’s howling gale. Melanie’s hair whipped wildly around her face as a storm, once bottled, now raged—trapped inside the room.
A tremendous scream knocked Melanie back—passed over her, through her—and it was unmistakably the voice of Master Belladino.
Just as violently as it began, the storm stopped. Dissipated.
Melanie’s lungs heaved as she gulped for air. She clutched at her chest, her face.
Leiwood doubled over, hands braced on his thighs, back shuddering as he struggled for breath. “I think—” he gasped, “it’s safe to assume that wasn’t right.”
“We didn’t trap it again, did we?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then where did it go?” Could it hurt someone else? Could it settle in a mind without a mask?
“I think … I think maybe it’s gone. For good. We released it.”
“Is that … good?”
Leiwood threw out a flippant hand, a weary shrug. “Gods, who knows? We should probably count ourselves lucky a bit of breathlessness is all the abuse it deigned to visit upon us before leaving us be.”
He pointed at the syringe, still stuck fast in the wood. “It’s all yours.”
She snatched it up, hurrying to the mixture, pulling the dose into the barrel quickly, as though afraid the enchanted glass would shatter in her hand and leave her bereft at the last moment. Her fingers shook, but she worked the plunger smoothly.
She glanced over her shoulder—at Leiwood, into the corners of the room, the ceiling, the fireplace. Perhaps the echo was gone, perhaps it was not.
Perhaps it would return to spite her and ruin the formula in the end.
But she managed to fill the barrel to the proper line. Managed to pull her quivering fingers from the syringe’s guard. Managed to set it down without dropping it or pricking herself.
And now, for another hour still, they had to wait.
She sat down in front of the fireplace, its coals long cold. The grate dark, the mouth of the chimney ominous.
“You can’t return an empty mask,” Leiwood said quietly, after a time. He stood in front of the window, looking out at the bustling below.
“I’m aware.”
“If you show your face there again, the owner will have you arrested. The penalty—”
She cut him off. “I’m aware.” She fidgeted with the hem of her skirt. “Why didn’t you … your father’s mask…?”
“It’s privately held. I haven’t given the Regulators a reason to ask after it. The state doesn’t know I ruined it. Even the shopkeeper, he knows I went through a fight with the echo, but he doesn’t know…”
“And yet you display it, clearly halved?”
He looked at his shoes, shuffled his feet. “After this, I won’t.”
“Couldn’t we … couldn’t we explain?” she suggested, only half hopeful. “If we tell them how it went, how the echo turned—We’re not bad people. We didn’t mean to ruin—”
“In the eyes of the law, we are,” he said firmly. “We destroyed a sacred object. Two for me, now. The state has its narratives, and it leaves very little room for mitigating circumstances.” He turned, found her gaze. “We are the villains of this story, make no mistake.”
“Then we have to get rid of the evidence. We have to burn it.”
Taking that as a directive, he scooped it off the bedding, hurrying to her side, making to toss it behind the grate—
She caught his wrist. “Not here. Not where someone could see, or where they might find evidence. Later. We’ll take it far afield. Perhaps … I can do it on my way home. My mother and I will need to leave as soon as we’re able. And we’ll have to … Oh gods, the shopkeeper, he’ll look for me, won’t he?”
“The Regulators will come looking for you,” Leiwood corrected. “You can’t simply disappear without returning a mask.”
“I can’t return it, we already covered that. What—what if … Could we buy it? Your mask is privately owned, so no one—”
He shook his head. “A Regulator would oversee the sale. Besides, where would you get the time vials? I can’t afford to buy it. I can’t afford any mask at that shop”—a pained expression crossed his features—“not without risking the inn. If I could, I would—”
“No. No, I wouldn’t ask that of you. Of course not.”
She couldn’t run, she couldn’t hide, she couldn’t return the mask and pretend to be ignorant. She needed a plan. There had to be something she could do, some way to keep anyone from searching for her. All she wanted was to disappear back into the countryside with her mother and never see another blasted mask ever again.
“We can’t burn it either, can we?” she breathed. “Disenchanting it is one thing, burning it … It won’t erase what happened.” Melanie pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging her arms around them. “I just wanted to save her. I love her so much, she doesn’t deserve…”
“We’ll think of something,” Leiwood said, though his voice lacked the confidence of his words.
There had to be a way. A way out of this.
She’d only had good intentions. Only wanted to be a good daughter.
How had it all gone so wrong?
Now, if the state found out, they would rip her away from Dawn-Lyn—perhaps even before she was well again. Her mother would be left alone, without help, and Melanie—she—
She’d be tossed into a labor camp. Or worse.
Her hand was burned now, but if she was found guilty of a crime against Knowledge—
Melanie felt an invisible blade pass through her wrist, severing it. She swallowed the panicked cry that threatened to squeeze itself from her throat.
No. Oh, sweet gods, please no.
When the hour was up, Melanie readied her things, preparing to give her mother the first dose, trying to put her other anxieties out of her mind for now. She placed all she needed into a satchel. Leiwood walked her to the door, but she stopped him from opening it.
