Knite

She trembled with fatigue. It made sense. As a daughter of House Lorail, she had little talent and training in the ways of a Duros.

“Great-Uncle,” Illora said, “how long will you have me stand here?”

I looked up from the reports I’d had Danar bring me. “Are you no longer able? It has only been a day and a half.”

“If it is what you wish, I am. It’s just, in my limited wisdom, I’m failing to understand why you wish me to. My attendance at the Academy was expected this morning and this exercise has delayed me some, so…”

I placed the reports down, stood, and walked around the large desk I’d had brought into my bed chambers. Useless to me, the bed had been pushed to the corner of the room, the desk taking its place in the center of the room.

“Tell me,” I said, coming to stand before Illora, “why do you think I’ve had you wait?”

She bowed before she spoke. I appreciated the respect and what it said of her. “The reason or reasons seem to be beyond my ability to understand.”

“And if you had to hazard a guess?”

“I would in all likelihood invoke the hazard of being wrong.”

I smiled. “I think I’m starting to like you, Illora. You present a sharper mind than your mother and a more likable disposition than any relative of yours I’ve had the displeasure of meeting.”

Illora frowned. “If I may, I think I’d prefer you not speak ill of them in my presence.”

“Else?” I asked, still smiling.

She bowed again. “Empty threats would insult us both. I was merely expressing my distaste for hearing my family insulted, deserved or not.”

“Fair,” I said. “Then I shall refrain from doing so as ardently as my nature and motives allow.”

She bowed a third time, much of the stiffness of her previous attempts gone.

“Do you love your mother?” I asked.

Her eyes flew open. Only a fraction. Only for a moment. But enough to tell me the question had shaken her.

“She has always been good to me,” she said.

“And?”

“And I think I should love her even if I do not.”

I shook my head in amusement. “I’m liking you more and more my dear niece. However, I prefer you not construct your answers in ways that appease yet consist of no true substance with which to appease. Do you love your mother?”

Her eyes and lips narrowed ever so slightly. I’d seen the very same look on many a wordsmith. It came upon them when their subversive tricks came to light and they were trying to formulate a way out. It was a look her grandmother had taught me to spot by letting me know when I was guilty of it. I found it ironic to be doing the same for her grandchild.

“I understand having a complicated relationship with the woman who raised you,” I said. “Believe me, I do, but in the end, it always comes down to a yes or a no.”

“Then I would say yes, I love my mother.”

“And you will keep the secrets that could ruin her soul?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said, walking back to my seat. “You may leave.”

She hesitated. “But…”

I resumed my reading of the reports. She remained where she was.

“Great-Uncle,” she said, all tentative.

“Yes?”

“Excuse my rudeness, but may I ask a question?”

“Since you stand there without having suffered any ill effects, I would say you should assume you may.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why have you had me stand here for almost two days?”

I shrugged. “To see if you would.”

A twitch and she’d smothered her irritation. I appreciated that. I always appreciated self-control.

“Why are you being civil with me?” she asked.

“Because I see no reason not to be.”

Another flare. “Why are you trusting me with a secret that could unravel your plans?”

“Because I know I can.”

And another.

I chuckled. “At least I offered more substance than you did.”

She smiled, amused. Odd, I thought. She’d inherited many of her mother’s features. Lira smiled too, just never this…genuinely. It's strange to see lips you’ve known for centuries do things you never imagined they would.

“Is that to say you will not expound on them?” she asked.

I waved to the seat across the desk from me. “Come. Sit. Let us converse for a while and see what answers I’m willing to provide. I find I take pleasure in your company.”

Illora sat, her back kept from the chair by her immaculate posture.

“So,” I began, “let us pay heed to your first question. What do you think your waiting two days before uttering a single word told me?”

Illora shrugged. “A great deal, or very little, or somewhere in between. Such is the problem with making assumptions.”

“Humor me.”

“It might've called me patient, fearful, intimidated, or respectful. It might've been I was calculating scenarios, gauging your reaction to my obedience, plotting some scheme, or simply frozen in dumbfounded disbelief at the sequence of events that had led to these rather unpredictable circumstances I find myself in. I could name more, but—”

“No, your answer shall serve. Now, considering who I am, what I can do and all I can see, what say you then?”

“Hm. I wasn’t sure the tales of your souleyes were true.”

“Some are, some aren’t. Yes, I can see the evil on any soul. Yes, I see emotions. No, I cannot read thoughts as she can.”

“I see,” she said. “Then I suspect you know exactly why I waited until I did.”

“I do,” I said. The concern for her mother had not left her. Fear for another is to fear for yourself what the sour of old is to the sweet of fresh; I did not much like the smell of it. “I take it you have your answer?”

She nodded. “‘The longer you let fear simmer, the softer the will that fights it.’ It’s one of my mother's more favorite sayings.”

“Why did you expect me to be uncivil?”

“I was led to believe you were a savage of sorts, one who ignored the charm of civility.”

“Then the answer to why I’d chosen to conduct myself in the manner I have rests entirely in your misguided preconceptions of who you expected me to be.”

Her eyes came back to mine, regarding me for a quiet moment. “Perhaps.”

“Is love pure?” I asked. Another widening of her eyes told me I’d surprised her again.

After her initial shock, she stewed for a while, contemplating her thoughts on the matter. “Rarely. Rare enough I’ve never seen it.”

“I think you speak of infatuation or some other form of pervertible attraction. I agree, those do not signify a degree of virtue.”

“Love does not require virtue.”

“Well, I would say to love another you must have a measure of virtue, however small or separate or suffocated it may be.”

“My grandmother has no goodness, yet I’m sure she holds some love for me.”

I shook my head, remembering she’d not reached twenty cycles. “I pity you if you believe she does. She loves your potential and all it may accomplish for her, not you, hence departing from the meaning I’m ascribing to the word.”

She looked at me like some foreign entity whose type she’d not yet met or heard of. “You are far from what I’d expected.”

“And what was it you expected.”

“A god more severe, less affable, and altogether more intimidating than you.”

“And the slaughter of house Tarneel did not portray me as such?”

“No. You and your guards were impressive, but only that. Impressive. I’ve seen the matriarch do far worse—at least in the field of intimidation. Have you ever touched the mind of someone who’d suffered her entertainment?” She shook her head in disgust and horror. “The pain she’s capable of is far worse than the display you had me witness.”

“Illora, Illora, my dear Illora. Your every word makes me wonder how you came to be, descended from—” I cut myself off. “In spite of how you were raised, you are an honest soul.”

Illora raised an eyebrow in bashful amusement. “Were you resisting the urge to slur my mother? I think you might've failed. As tacit as you were attempting to be, you did, by implication, call her a liar.”

I slammed a hand to the table. Illora flinched back before my laughter had a chance to ease her concerns. I roared with it, tickled by the fearless humor of this brave girl who seemed a bright light of salvation in a family I’d conscripted to doom.

“I did say I would only go so far as to not impede my motives,” I said. “Also, I do not think she would consider my words an insult.”

Illora gave me a rueful smile of an age she hadn't reached. “I suppose lies are my family's trade.”

“Tell me,” I said, “would you be willing to do me a favor? I will offer you a promise of equal if not greater value in turn.”

“It would depend.”

“On?”

“On how the favor and promise weigh on my scales. We may not attach the same value to them.”

I almost chortled at that. “Say you return to the Academy, and say you play at being my eyes and ears for a time, would a promise to keep your mother alive as long as you do not reveal the secret of my return suit as payment?”

“You said a favor for a promise. Seems to me you are asking for two.”

“Ah, well, I thought my keeping you alive was implied.”

For the first time, a shiver of fear for herself passed through her. I resisted its inviting scent.

“I had thought you did not kill innocents,” she said.

I was too good to let my surprise show, masking my jolt of surprise into a move to lean forward. “My subordinates would take it upon themselves to solve that problem for me. Without my explicit instruction, you would likely meet your death the moment you crossed the threshold of this room. To my guards, your very existence is reason enough to cut you down.”

“And if I’d chosen to leave after you’d dismissed me?”

I shrugged. There was no need for her to know one way or the other.

She pouted, again reminding me of her true age. “You are far more like my grandmother than you’d care to admit.”

My eyes narrowed, her words an insult I took to heart.

“This whole conversation was a manipulation,” she said, “every word and action designed to pave a road for me to walk, which, like a clueless Mud, I did.”

I leaned back, the tension of my coiled violence dissipating. “I had almost thought you foolish enough to accuse me of being a liar. I’m glad you weren’t.”

She stood, huffing like a child who’d lost a game. “I know you don’t lie. That verity only highlights my negligence. Grandmother would scold me to no end if she ever knew.”

“Sit down and calm yourself, child. I’ve been playing this game for far too long for you to feel unjustly outmatched. And remember, while I am not as supreme as Lorail in the art of reading and manipulating thoughts, I am, when the need strikes me, rather accomplished at molding emotions to my liking.”

Illora flushed, embarrassed she’d let her composure slip. She sat back down, collecting herself. “Am I to understand you’ll compel me to seal this agreement with a bond?”

“It wouldn't do for me to uphold an agreement you’ve already broken, would it? But no, not a bond as such.”

“If not a bond, then—”

“A promise.”

“Of words?” she asked. I laughed. “Of soul then. How am I to know you aren't swindling me by some means I’m unable to decipher.”

“As you well know,” I said, “I never lie.”

“But you don’t always tell the truth," she countered.

Another smile broke onto my lips. “Remember, child, I have the skill and strength to force you into a greater bond without the need for trickery.” Again, she did not need to know my promises would never allow it.

She sighed. “Very well.”

Half an hour later saw me in Lira’s crypt, standing before the cage Crowol had locked herself in, its door now open. She was unconscious, her lips cracked, skin dry, hair a wild mess of wiry threads. Sensus deprivation had stripped her of her beauty. With little to no talent in the Zephyr or Golem arts, she was wholly susceptible to the skeleton cage.

I kicked her. She groaned and blinked awake. Behind me, Roche, who I’d found hovering outside my new chambers, sword in hand and ready to take my niece's throat, snickered in delight. Behind his cheerful, talkative, and largely affable persona hid a damaged man whose darkness ran deeper than his humor. I guess he wouldn’t have been one of mine if he wasn’t broken in some way. Sometimes I worried he was too broken.

“Greetings Crowol,” I said. “I hear you are too valuable to discard.”

“Who?” she croaked.

“Unimportant for now,” I said. “What is important—at least to you—is that I’m having trouble with a choice I must make. As it so intimately relates to your fate, would you be so kind as to help me decide?”

“You're a man,” she said, her thoughts struggling to catch up to the situation.

“Definitely an asset,” Roche sneered. “A genius unmatched in observation and wit. To be able to tell a man from a woman, and then to so succinctly phrase such a grand revelation, she must be—”

Roche quietened at my cold look, reigning in his spiteful tirade. The massacre in Lira’s Hall had freed his vindictiveness from his apprehension, the belief that no godling or royal in the city could match his skill hardening his thirst for the suffering of all who constituted the island.

I turned back to Crowol. “So?”

“Where is the Mistress?” Crowol asked, having caught up a little.

I turned to my handsome subordinate. “Roche, what would you choose?”

A smile crept onto his face. If I didn’t know him it might’ve seemed friendly. “I have a few I’d like to pursue. My favorite would need a dozen or so healing spikes, a box of hunger-crazed rats, some salt, and a whole lot of time. My second—”

A spark. That’s all it was, all the warning I got. I pushed Roche out of the cage, feeling the divine matrix etched into Crowol’s soul build in power. “Close the door! Now!”

Roche slammed the door closed, locking me and Crowol within. The skeleton cage completed its circuits. The etchings on the door aligned with those on the walls, ceiling, and floor to lock together the cluster of matrixes. The cerulean ball released by Crowol’s soul-imbedded matrix bounced off of its luminous barrier just as it sprang to life.

I reached for the fist-sized globe of sensus. Already its energies were being devoured by the skeleton cage. My zephyr and golem extraction matrixes spun, suckling thin streams of sensus from the starved air and stone within the cage, coalescing around the sphere and pulling it to my hand.

“No!” Crowol screamed. She came for me, rage burning what little energy she had left. A crisp slap thrust her into the back wall. She shook it off and came again.

The cell was small. It offered little room to maneuver. I didn’t need much. A tilt to my head evaded her clawed hand, fingers of bone fashioned by her reaper abilities sparking against the skeleton-cage door behind me. She paid the pain, if she felt any, no mind. My hand shot out, palm open, striking one side of her face and pushing onwards until the other met the sensus-built wall. Neither speck nor crumb was dislodged from the stone, not to say the force was insignificant, but to say the sensus-molded wall was less so.

Crowol groaned. She was on the verge of fainting. Or so it appeared. I was not so unobservant to be surprised by the thin dagger she pulled from her sleeve. Calm had befallen her after my first attack, her soul shutting off her emotions. I’d seen it happen and knew her weakness was a pretense to lure me in. I didn’t mind. Sometimes the best way to avoid a trap is to fall into it.

I released my soul. In a skeleton cage and almost cut off from the rest of the world, an instance was safe enough.

She went breathless, frozen in the sudden pressure of a soul as old and powerful as mine. I plucked the weapon from her grasp before she could acclimate herself to the smothering weight. Without a weapon and on the brink of exhaustion, she crumpled, the fight snuffed from her.

“I’m doomed,” she said, her voice monotone.

“Almost certainly,” I said.

“Kill me.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer life a little while longer.”

My attention returned to the ball of sensus she’d released. It glowed within my grasp, the protective film of sensus I’d shaped around it flickering in strength.

“Roche,” I called.

Old hinges whimpered as the heavy door crawled open. I stepped out. Roche tortured the door closed behind me.

“So, about the method of interrogation,” he said.

“No. Her fate is Lira’s to do with as she pleases.”

“Lira!” he said, throwing his arms up. “Why? Why would you give her something I want?”

“I half promised her I would.”

“Why?”

“You’ve had several of her kind fall to you days before, hundreds if not thousands more to follow in days to come. Why does this one matter?”

He frowned in defiance. “Because in this instance you are choosing her wants over mine.”

“Lira’s?”

“Yes! She who is sister to…to…”

“A hound, unfed and stripped of its strength, is of no use to its master.”

Roche’s mind inhaled my words, the meaning he ingested measured in how deep a shade of embarrassment his skin flushed. When he understood enough, flushing scarlet despite the cold, he turned away and said, “Apologies Master, I did not mean to be so recklessly ungrateful.”

“I understand your rage and how it blinds you. It is why I’ll not punish you.”

He inclined his head in thanks. “So, what happened.”

“I found she is not one of Lira’s.”

“Then who’s pawn is she?”

I smiled. “Well, Lura’s of course.”

I had to forgive him a few more times for the torrent of tunnels and wires he threw at me.