106 - The germ of the head

One never foresees all of an unfolding disaster at once. Our minds are merciful, blinding us to the full implications in each moment, extinguishing our hopes only stepwise. So the philosopher wrote, and she gained no popularity by it, for who wants to read, or meditate upon, that? But it’s true.

The second day after my seventh fight, I never remembered beyond a little before the noon meal. The line of memory picks up with cold and wet and hardness pressing against my head and body, and the stink of rot. I was lying, shivering, in darkness and a foul stream of water; my eyes felt wrapped all around with thick wet felt, as if my brain were made of it. I heard the rattle of leaves blowing along stone, footsteps and the thump of a walking-stick, then distant laughter as if through glass windows.

“Young man.” I woke once more, having gone senseless again for a time, preferring it, I suppose; the voice, an old woman’s, sharp and definite, snagged my mind. Her walking-stick poked at my ribs. I lifted my head; it felt as if it should keep going, toppling forward to drop off my shoulders. “This is no place for you. You’re a foreigner, a Mezem boy, you should be there. Come on, up. What a disgraceful state to get yourself into. No gloves even; tsk.”

The darkness, I saw, was night. My body was heavy and stiff as wood, but weak as a child’s. We were outside a tavern. When I was on my elbows, nausea seized me; I barely crawled out of the stream, so my vomit wouldn’t flow onto me, in time. “Home with you, child.” The hot bath waited, a warm cup of nectar with something to bring peace, Iska to examine me, Skorsas turning back my bed. The Mezem: home.

I didn’t know the way; I didn’t even know where in the city we were. She had to lead me, lighting the way with her torch. She was ancient, her eyes like robin’s eggs in nests of wrinkled flesh, with a look of having seen everything. I needed her arm to lean on, too, while she leaned on her stick; she insisted I borrow a kerchief to hide my hands, and used another to cover wherever I touched her.

I learned how she could walk alone after dark without fear when four toughs, instead of threatening, greeted her respectfully, calling her “Sera Midwife.” Hers had probably been the first pair of arms that ever held them. When we got to the Mezem gate, I said, “I should give you something in thanks.” She refused everything, other than my signing her kerchief ‘Karas Raikas.’

I made it along the colonnade by leaning against the wall. Between the Legion Mirrors, I tried standing alone, which was a mistake. Faint and hazy in the dark, I saw the rank of me, a hundred Karas Raikases to either side: a formidable force the writers would make that out to be, I thought, except we’re all reeling: Chen! Straighten up! But the first step of the march lurched me too far sideways; my shoulder bumped too hard into the shoulder of the next Raikas over, who somehow had fallen into me precisely the same way.

I tried to check myself, lost my feet, and heard a muffled clank. From the floor I saw my sprawled reflection slowly rise, and the line of selves behind it shoot up like a whip and vanish; then I understood. The mirror, long and tall as the wall, had been knocked off its moorings, and was falling. I closed my eyes, turned my face downward and wrapped my arms around my head. The crash, no words can describe.

Iska came running, Skorsas on his heels. “Yes, it’s him,” Skorsas said, almost blearily. “Always, I’ll be picking slivers of glass off you,” said Iska. “Lie still.” Servants came, gasping; a mirror so big is worth far more, say, than twice as much as one half its size. When I was clean of glass, they took me into the clinic.

“I know you’re not drunk, lad,” Iska said. “I believe you.” I must have been avowing my innocence. He smelled my breath, tasted my spit, looked long into my eyes and felt my head all over, asking if it hurt anywhere, which it didn’t. When they stripped me for the bath I saw him glance at the crook of my arm, but thought nothing of it. The water burned, driving away my chills in a moment. “Calm, Raikas, “ he said. “You’ve got more drug in you than what the Mahid fed you, but you’ll be all right.”

I went dizzy again, heard my head thump back against the wooden tub-edge. Something kept coming into my mind, each time with a flash and a chiming: the sight of an orange jewel, emerald-cut, that was somehow deathly urgent. Hands held me sitting, voices said, “Calm, Raikas, steady, what is it?” Somehow I made it clear to them, I remembered nothing later than the afternoon. It was now well past midnight.

“They didn’t want you to, then,” Iska said. “That’s one of the drugs… Two Mahid took you; they drugged your dinner.” Skorsas’s face swam closer, all but weeping. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I gave it to you; they took it right out of my hands and sprinkled it full of powder and said, ‘Make sure he eats it…’I just had to pray it wouldn’t kill you, I’m sorry…” I heard my voice, forgiving him.

Iska put his gloved hand on my shoulder and said, “You were needle-drugged, lad. See this?” On the inner crease of my sword-elbow were two tiny red spots like insect bites. “One of the ones they gave you has to be the amnesiac, since you’ve forgotten so much time. The other was most likely truth-drug. I hope you have nothing to hide from them. They took Mannas, too, and he had one mark, so maybe it was about when the two of you tried to escape…” The candle-flames all went dark.

When next I knew they were lifting me out, and Iska was saying, “I can’t give him much of anything, he’s got too much needle-piss in him already.” That night I slept in ragged patches, full of nightmares, through which the orange jewel flashed in and out like a fish in stained water. In the morning, there was something in my juice that dulled all my thoughts and feelings; but I welcomed it.

Over breakfast, Mana looked at me, all he dared to do, with a look like one meaning to share anguish. He knew more than I did. We made our sign to meet in the woods, but when I headed to the Weapons Trust, Iska stopped me, with the most bitterly apologetic look in his eyes. “You’d better stay here, lad,” he said. “They said they were going to come back for you again today.”

I trained, but was forbidden to spar. As sparring-time came, and Koree set me to practicing forms alone, two Mahid came along the corridor, in step and smooth as cats, armed with daggers and dart-tubes. The usual colonnade hangers-on casually scattered. “Celestialis dump its commodes,” said Koree. “Them again. Who the fik do they want this time?” Iska hadn’t told him, I guess.

With Chirel in my hand, I had thoughts that were natural enough, I guess. Koree sensed that, for he said, “Naw, lad, don’t fight them. They always make it worse if you do. You’re too fuddled to make a good account of yourself, anyway. Don’t be scared, don’t forget: you’re too valuable a piece to die anywhere but the Ring. They probably just want information out of you.” Never until now, I thought, have I truly known what fear is.

Mahid always say the same thing: “Karas Raikas, you are required.” With quick, hard hands they clipped my wrists into manacles. In the streets, everyone stayed back from us, turning their eyes away and pretending not to see us, as they do with Mahid and those they arrest.

The part of the Marble Palace they took me into was much more austere, almost stark, with grey marble walls and a black marble floor of odd plainness. In the gloom of inside, every wall sconce held a bluish flame, making every face seem ill, or like a ghost’s, in their light.

They stripped me of everything but what I wore around my neck, and bathed me in a shower-stall all of beige marble, with water-spout of brass. Somehow as I was looking at that, my heart ceased to feel again, and the fear went like a stream of water shut off. I became the spectator of my own life, from afar; yet the actor playing me knew my moves and lines well, performing them just as realistically as I could have.

In a small room lit brightly by sun that seemed conveyed in through channels and by mirrors, somehow, they made me lie on a table like a healer’s but with shackles, and locked in my wrists and ankles. An old man in a white satin robe with the deft hands and careful manner of a healer opened a box, drew out several vials and other shining things. Thus—how else?—I first met Amitzas Mahid, the Imperial Pharmacist, as he was titled.

A middle-aged Mahid slid a thing like a harness with two vices in around my head, and clamped it tight on my temples and cheekbones so I could not move my head even a hair’s width. Watching him was a boy of about fifteen, his bare arms bright against his Mahid black: a Mahid apprentice.

That was the first touch of the hollow needle I can remember, as well: he pricked four times around my eyes, pressing something from the vial attached to the needle that felt warm into me, and in a short time I could not move them either, but only stare at the spot of ceiling I’d been looking at when they’d gone dead. It was when he lifted the syringe with a curving needle a good hand-span long that I asked him what he was doing. He closed my sword-side eye, washed it with some sharp-smelling liquid, and answered civilly that he would explain when it was done.

I felt nothing, but saw it all from the other eye: his hands, delicate and steady, placing the point under the brow-ridge, and threading it in around my eyeball. I heard the faintest click, on bone deep inside my head; his hand stopped, adjusted, began again. It was more than a finger deep when he pressed whatever was in the instrument into me. Once done, he bandaged both my eyes closed—to keep them from drying out since I couldn’t blink, he told me—and explained what he had done, as he had promised.

Grium sefalian is the Arkan: it means “seed of the head.” They say it is older than the Fire, brought down from their first home in the sky, along with all other substances they alone possess. A living thing, like a yeast, that grows by feeding on the flesh of the brain: unchecked it kills, bringing madness first. Two moons ago, I might not have believed this, thinking they meant to torture me with a tale, but I’d seen many things since then.

I had forty-three fights to go, a year and a half, perhaps. This seed was timed to kill in two years. “It is the will of the Imperator,” he said, “that you be informed: on winning fifty fights you will be administered the antidote.” I understood. All ways of escaping that required the aid of Arkans were already closed off to me; this closed off all the rest.

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