The Writing on the Wall CH27

The woman flapped out the collar of her white coat, as if coming so close to me gave her chills.  "Very well.  I was to inform you of such things in any case, Miss Idony."  The way she pronounced my name made it sound like a curse.  She turned, made a motion to Kosmo, and then turned back.

There was a crack of paper and suddenly I was no longer holding it.  My bluff would not have gone well, it seemed.  I pretended that whatever it was he had done, it was beneath my notice.

"As you can see, we have been working on a rather ambitious project," the woman said.  She brushed past me, her collar still turned up, and I could see a name tag bearing the label of 'Miss Saccourt' pinned to her coat.  "It has produced extensive results, but not terribly impressive ones."

"I don't see any results at all," Noni said, obviously trying to sneer at the tubes.  Instead she just looked apprehensive.  Maybe because I knew her well enough to tell the difference.

Miss Saccourt did not respond directly.  "The average layman cannot see anything inside these tubes.  Even for one of us, only the medical statistics here and here," she pointed with a manicured finger to different panels on the machine nearest her, "show us the difference between an occupied tube and an empty one."

"Why occupy them at all?" Chrysander asked.  "And why can I see them when laymen aren't supposed to?"

She gave him a curious look, and then laughed.  It was a sound utterly without mirth, and any related expression barely affected her mouth.  It was like watching someone learn how to laugh from a book.  "You are not a layman, of course.  Diviners have some ability to see the Hollow Children, but it is not nearly what is needed."

"But I am."

"Oh yes."  She spun to face me, coming far too close.  As if that personal distaste had just melted.  Perhaps she was imagining glass between us, as if I was in one of the tubes.  Maybe I would be soon.  "You are such a very special case, Miss Idony."

For a brief moment, I thought she was going to bring up radiance, the way many had.  I beat her to it, just in case.  "It's to do with seeing the Hollow Man, isn't it?  Not about radiance."  I willed it to be about radiance.  Still relying on the fact that I wasn't.

"Oh, the two are not mutually exclusive, as well you must know."  She flipped her hair out, like a strange cross between Dr Cordet and Noni.  "I cannot pretend that I like the word, but we live in times when such vernacular infects even the scientific realm."  She put her hands on her hips.  "Radiance is nothing near so special and wonderful as an ordinary person would make out.  It does not equate to mere beauty, nor even power.  Genetics are a fascinating science."

I turned back to the tubes.  The Hollow Child inside the nearest one appeared to sleep, disinterested in the proceedings that I could feel swirling me into another entropy.  "Get to the point then.  You want me to find the Hollow Man for you.  Dr Cordet already said as much.  After all of this," I gestured, not at the circuit of Hollow Children, but at the real, visible people gathered together in dischordant knots.  My friends.  "You can hardly expect me to think that it still ends there."

"Indeed it does not.  Where it ends is rather up to you."  She snapped her fingers, so close to Kosmo's face that he gave a distasteful risen eyebrow.  Signalling that she was annoying, but still beneath his notice.  "Kosmo will escort you to the Zal Room, where you will do your part for king and country.  He shall drag you by the hair if necessary."

"I can walk under my own recognizance," I snapped indignantly.  However, I found myself backing up into Chrysander.  The comforting warmth of his hand on my back, though still silly and rather confusing now that I knew he was a more than average idiot.  "Just tell me what I have to do.  You said you would."

Miss Saccourt blinked at me, as though I were either quite irrevocably dim, or some kind of puzzling lizard.  "But I have just done so.  This is a service to the kingdom itself."

"Ridding the world of the Hollow Man?"

She laughed again, that same mirthless, book-learned laugh.  "Of course not.  That would be against the point."

"What point?!"  I had not meant to shout.  As I did so, I felt an entire section of the Hollow Children wake up.  Each of them leaned against the glass, their little hands pressing hard as they yearned to come out.  They wanted to clamber around me, I could feel it.  Some of them even made purling noises, baby attempts at speaking.

I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or be sick on someone.

"All of this," Miss Saccourt said, sweeping an arm at the circuit of connected tubes.  "With you, we shall be able to make them so much more than this."  A hungry look overtook her face, and I could have sworn that there were fine wrinkles on her face.  She couldn't have been more than five years older than me.

She snapped her fingers at Kosmo again, earning a wearied look from him.  "Yes, yes, escort the prisoner by her hair.  A little tact would be nice."

"One need not waste such things on you," she said.  It sounded as though she simply believed it.  There wasn't so much as a derisive sneer on her face as she looked up at him.  "Go on."  As if she were talking to a dog.  "To the Zal Room."

I grabbed hold of Chrysander's elbow, as much to stop him doing something foolish, like hugging me from behind, as to drag him over to Demetrius and the others.  They weren't saying anything at all, not even muttering amongst themselves.  I wished that Demetrius would shout about his father, demand to see him.  But he just stood there, staring at the tubes without looking at them.  His face was pale.

"Give back the grandmaster."  It was pitiful and awkward coming from me, but if he wasn't going to do it, then I bloody well was.  "Just...  I'll do whatever you want, I don't care.  Just give Demetrius back his father and let them all leave."

"What a foolish notion.  Kosmo--"

"Young lady, you will recall something more of my details."  He straightened and smoothed out his clothes, subtly calling attention to the revolver, now holstered, and a few flashes of light over his person that, upon closer inspection, were quite clearly small throwing knives.

Miss Saccourt did not appear to be impressed, but she did shut up.  It was amazing how much that improved the mood, but my friends still remained silent.

"Now."  Kosmo turned to me, still glittering with lethal accoutrements.  "Your cooperation is what I was ordered to achieve."  He flicked a hand at Miss Saccourt.  "Not by this silly cow, but by my employer.  Will I have that cooperation, in full, if your friends are allowed to live?"

My lip quivered, but I did not press it between my teeth.  "Not in full.  They will go home."

"That isn't possible.  Nor is the return of the grandmaster to his son."

He had no sooner said as much when Demetrius exploded, like a gas tank that had previously been courting an open flame.  Demetrius did not roar as the general had.  He pushed past me, hands out, and launched himself onto Kosmo.

The scuffle didn't even properly become that.  I covered most of my eyes, waiting for the cry of surprise and a pool of blood, one arm reaching out to stop him.

Neither came.  It shouldn't have surprised me.  Kosmo held Demetrius up by the collar, using both hands.  While Demetrius's feet dangled, Kosmo regarded him as a cat examining a mouse while it was not feeling hungry.  "I admire your pluck, but you really should wait for people to finish talking.  I was going to say that it is not possible to reunite you and your father at this juncture."

"That's not good enough!"

"Of course it isn't.  Heaven knows how we all love our dads."  There was a heavy dose of irony in his tone, especially when he looked around the room and fixed his eyes on me for a few moments.  "All is on your young lady friend."

I shivered.  The heavy sensation in my gut was spinning like a tiny tidepool.  I could feel a detached, but stalking delight watching the situation with glee.  "I already said I would do what you want.  It doesn't matter what it is."

"Ah, at last an attitude that I can understand.  No more of this touchy feely business."  Kosmo set Demetrius's feet back on the stone floor and, looking oddly like a butler, picked at his shoulders as if removing lint, straightening out the wrinkles in his shirt.  "Again, your full cooperation, Miss Idony."

"As long as no one else is hurt."  My own voice was getting farther away from me.  There were so many Hollow Children awake now, clamouring for a source.  Desperately hungry for whatever it was inside me.  It crawled into my chest and nested there instead, like a spider in a bottle moving to a web it had made using the curve between the narrow bottleneck and the rest of the glass.  It was all I could do to speak.

Chrysander did something silly then.  He spun me round and caught me in a full embrace, in front of everyone.  Him and his linden tree thoughts.  I really ought to have kneed him in the groin, but I didn't.  Let him have his moment under the linden tree, I told myself.  Something in Miss Saccourt's bored face said that he never would otherwise.

When several moments had passed, and he had yet to release me, I did not knee him in the groin, but I did push him off.  Well, I say push.  Really I just worked my arms in to make him stand back.  After returning the embrace.  Maybe I wanted the linden tree as well.

I'd never know.  I was already halfway up the stairs with Kosmo by then.  Refusing to look back.  I didn't want to see him or any of them, staring up at me.  Not after I had failed Demetrius--worse, I was the reason his father had been taken.  Noni would not be glad to see me go.  But perhaps she would, whispered the voice of the metaphorical spider bottlenecked in my chest.  She had never liked the idea of my being near him, and points given to intuition where credit was due, she'd had more reason than I would ever understand.  Even Soterios, who could have been safe at home with his grandmother.  His luck had failed him, and that could only be the Hollow Man's greater influence, branching out of me in a similar, darker circle.

"Why did they have to get involved?"

There was no one who could answer the question, I knew, but Kosmo was there, so I gave it voice anyway.  He did not answer.  He simply went on walking, prodding me onward with his steady, butlerian gait.

I stared at the ground, taking in the sight of a frayed old carpet that could have been magnificent once.  Though it was colourless now, I imagined it to have been red.  "Your shoes are scuffed."

"That is an odd thing to notice, Miss Idony."

"You don't say my name funny either."

"I beg your pardon?"

We had stopped in front of a door, but the door remained shut.  For the first time since he had stopped being 'the driver' and had become 'Kosmo, the assassin,' he looked like a regular person.  The straight edge that made him so resemble a human knife did not dull, but rather, appeared to have been sheathed, or turned away.  I held a hand over my chest, struggling to breathe now.  "My family name.  The only other person who says it right is Soterios.  Everyone else pronounces it wrong."

Kosmo raised an eyebrow at me, barely shrugging, and then reached for the knob.  It had been harder to keep track of time, but I had the feeling that we had walked quite a long way.  When I looked back over my shoulder, the stairs were clearly far away.

"Inside."

Feeling the world that had built up around me, the world that contained friends and bizarre amounts of danger and silliness, I scowled up at him.  Trying to stuff that feeling into my chest to push the spider back down to the bottom of the bottle, I went inside.

That world fell away.  I imagined the spider chuckling over its easy defeat.

Machines coated the room, so much like the tubes that it took me a few seconds to realise that I had not been put inside one converted from a room.  Only a few bits of stone were visible.  "Why build in a castle if you're only going to cover it up?"

Two people in white coats like Miss Saccourt's, a man and a woman of roughly equal height and sharing the same overworked expression, stood by a large screen, holding clipboards.

Inside my chest, the spider hissed, making itself more real and less at the same time.  I nearly doubled over in pain.

The woman in the white coat skipped over to me and helped me straighten.  Her face was impassive, and she said something to her male counterpart.  At first it sounded like utter gibberish, but my brain delivered delayed translation to me after the pain had eased somewhat.  "Get her on the table.  I'll go and put the children under."

It could have meant something or nothing.  My vision was swimming, just as it had in the cave.  As much as I would have loved to be sick all over everything, getting muck over their horrible beeping, humming machines, I couldn't see clearly enough to aim.  I tried focusing on the black blur of Kosmo, but he was too far away.  Standing by the door.

Clicks and whooshes filled the air.  The door had opened and closed, or I thought it had.  My face felt cold and numb, and then I couldn't hold in the sick any longer.  Someone thrust a round, smooth object in my hands.  A dish of some kind.  I was sick in that, and felt cheated over it.  Not even on someone's shoes.

I might have tried to tip the dish out of spite, but it was removed before I could do more than contemplate the action.  Darkness welled up inside me.  The spider spun frantically inside the bottle, but the webs seemed to be falling away from the glass.  They couldn't stick.

"This is perfect!" someone exclaimed.  "Oh the power is immense.  He's trying to take her straight to him."

"Then what the diviners said was true.  No one can ever really escape Hollow Man."

"Well, you know theory.  And diviners..."

I groaned and rolled onto my side, only to be forced onto my back once more.  I couldn't remember lying down.  "Let me go," I heard myself say, but it came out an agonised whisper.

They just went on talking.

At last, a cool hand touched my forehead, and the shock of it drove the spider back.  I stared up at Kosmo's chin.  He was looking at a monitor and speaking to the man in a white coat.  "Don't rush it.  After the trouble I have taken, I shall be forced to kill you with no promise of compensation beyond animalistic satisfaction if you ruin whatever it is you are supposed to do."

He might have mumbled something about impatient zealots, but I was too busy sobbing with relief to pay him more attention than I already had.  The swimming sensation was gone, the tugging so lessened that it was almost like I had been let go.

The door opened and closed again.  I heard the woman say that it had been hellish to get all of the Hollow Children to stop their grabbing.  That they wanted me as much as the Hollow Man.  Something about a second batch and too many attempted improvements.  It was like being in a chatty tinker's shop.

Then she stopped, as if cut short by something.  But no one interrupted her.  Not verbally.

I tried to sit up, but the weight of Kosmo's cold hand on my forehead was like a bolt holding me down.  I glanced down at myself and realised that it wasn't due to his effort at all.  I had been strapped to a table.  Wires connected to me, as if I had been turned into a machine.

Frantically rebelling against this new world of beeping and cables, I traced a sigil in the warm metal of the table I lay on.  It would leave no mark and so do nothing, but that didn't matter.  It was just a kitchen sigil for reforming melted butter.  I just had to remind myself that there was still a place for magic among the infernal machines.

"Oh very well," Kosmo said, and his hand went away.  "There's no need to act in such an abrasive manner."

A familiar face leaned over mine, and my relief redoubled so that I almost passed out.  "General Thornbehr!"  Armed with more than an abrasive manner, I was sure.  He must have sent the white-coated people out, and was going to take care of his traitorous chauffeur.  "I'm so--did you help the others already?"

"Demetrius and his friends are quite safe," he said.  His beard bobbed oddly with his chin as he spoke.  The angle I was in made everything strange, but I thought I could see a smile hiding amongst the hair.  "It says much for your character that you bargained with an assassin for their welfare.  All shall remember you kindly, my dear."

The spider scrabbled inside me.  But it was not pulling.  At first, I thought it must be the machine, but then I felt a change that was not altogether foreign.  It had happened in the cave.  Just before I had been pulled deeper in, to that room.  The spider was afraid.

"What did you do to her?"  My voice rasped in my throat, as if I had tried to eat sand.  "Dr Cordet.  She isn't behind any of this.  The Hollow Man--you're the one trying to use him."

General Thornbehr walked away, but I did my best to turn my head.  The man and woman in white coats were still in the room, checking their clipboards fastidiously.  He looked so at home there, standing at attention in that thrumming room, that I was nearly sick again.  "Now, now.  There is no need for hysterics."

"Loose these bloody straps and I'll show you hysterics," I growled, tracing another sigil into the metal table.  Wishing it was at least leather so that I could scratch it into the material, blast the vision needed for precision.

He chuckled, and the spider cowered in my neck, choking my very breath.  The Hollow Man was actually frightened of this man.  Did they have him?  Tucked away somewhere, fueling these experiments.

I swallowed hard, forcing my breathing to clear enough that I could speak.  "That day the Hollow Man found me.  He wanted a sigil artist, and I was the only one out on holiday that day.  In that area."

"Quite possibly.  It is indeed what my team have surmised."

"Dr Cordet doesn't know anything about this."

"Indeed, the poor silly woman does not.  I am afraid that, ruthless and effective as she is, Asclepia Cordet lacks the vision to appreciate what we are doing here."  General Thornbehr began pacing.  "Much like Kosmo.  Though he lacks the vision to appreciate anything."

"Thank you, ser."

The general stroked his beard, gazing up at yet another monitor.  They were everywhere.  "When the Hollow Man found you, he waited for you to use your wonderful thoughtform magic.  He even summoned one of his deadly little cousins, the mimet, to ensure that you would use plenty of it.  You see, Miss Idony," and he pronounced it wrong, the way that everyone else did, "the true reason that thoughtform magic is so fiercely regulated is not to keep our beloved ruler from being usurped by a peasant.  It is to keep the sigil doodling peasants from opening their wonderful, radiant minds to nightmares like the Hollow Man."

"You opened your mind to it," Kosmo said, as if he were translating.  "The Hollow Man wanted to have you as a way to escape again.  He may not be a man, but he is less stupid than a beast."  There was no emotion in his voice.  An odd contrast to the crowing victory emanating from the general.

"Indeed.  And now that we have both you and the Hollow Man here, we may resume proper work producing my Hollow army."

The man in the white coat spoke then.  He sounded excited.  "General, he's reacting to her again."

"Excellent!  I shall want to see this for myself."

The door opened again, slamming shut this time.  I imagined I could hear footsteps, but they were soon gone.  Rage bubbled inside me, but I couldn't tell if it was mine or the spider's.  The Hollow Man's.  I tightened my fists.  "He's just going to kill them, isn't he?  My friends."

"I did promise they would be safe."

"What good is that?"

"More than you would think.  Honour isn't part of being an assassin, but it is part of being Kosmo."

For some reason, I pictured him bowing when he said this.  A machine very near my ear beeped, startling me so that I strained against the straps without thinking about it.  "And just who is that?  Who is Kosmo, anyway?  The general's loyal weapon?"

He laughed, and it was nothing like Miss Saccourt's ungainly monotone.  "No indeed.  If I had my way of things, one of my loyal weapons would have found his neck ages ago.  But he pays well, and that's not to be sneezed at."

Assassins and money.  There were proverbs about the love affairs between those two things.  I scoffed anyway.  "This connection to the Hollow Man is going to kill me," I said.  It was not something I had to be told.  The spider was scrabbling around again, this time industrious and fearful all at once.  The Hollow Children were sleeping, but calling to us both in their dreams.

To my surprise, Kosmo's face reappeared over mine.  His hair was longer than I had realised before, and it cut off a lot of the overhead light.  "He wouldn't do that.  Those ridiculous scientists said that you're something like a sister to him, with his thoughts infused in you."

I hated the sound of the word.  "They're going to kill him, and he has to take me with him.  He wants to.  Who would want to leave their sister behind?"  It was such an absurd way to talk about it that I nearly giggled helplessly.  "Though there are plenty who can leave their daughters."

I squinted my eyes shut.  It hadn't bothered me when it was just Soterios reminding me all the time.  With his accent, and knowing where he was from down to having stayed in his grandmother's home, I couldn't be bothered by it.  But Kosmo was different.  He had the same accent as Demetrius, the same grace with himself as Chrysander.  There was only that one note out of tune with the rest of the symphony of the everyday.

"Why do you say my name right?" I asked again, gritting my teeth.  "I'm going to die, you might as well tell me."

The straps bit into my wrists as I pulled against them.  It was like probing a sore tooth with one's tongue.  It made it hurt more, but not doing it was an impossibility.

Then they loosed, and my struggles brought one of my arms swinging up.  I stilled myself, too startled to move.

Kosmo kept his grip on the arm I had accidentally swung up at him, helping me to sit up.  "That question shouldn't need an answer," he said, not looking me in the eye.  "Your father was a very picky man.  I could never say his name just right, so he made up a sigil that was supposed to help in that regard.  I ended up with perfect diction in three languages, and he got a black eye for involving me in bloody thoughtform magic."

My knees wobbled, but I was able to stand.  However, he lifted me up off the ground, even more easily than he had lifted Demetrius before, and set me back on the table.

"Stay here."  Disgust twisted his features, but he was not looking at me.  Elegantly enunciated curses poured from him for a few moments as he paced back and forth.  It was like watching an ice sculpture after someone had lit a bonfire next to it.  "I have to figure out what to do."

"Don't you know?"

"Of course not.  It wasn't supposed to be blasted Idony's little girl.  Of all the sigil artists in the city..."  He wagged a finger at me, as if actually chiding me.  "Couldn't you have just--"  Then he spun away, running both hands through his thick black hair.  It made me think of Chrysander, but I pushed that thought right out.  The spider and this room were already too much.

"People are so complicated," I murmured.