Chapter 232: The Hymn of the Betrayed - 12
I slept the night through and woke. Morris remembers the place as nothing but a worn-out old house, and yet it is a well-kept home, a good one for a family. Victoria hasn't shown herself once since dinner. But what am I supposed to do? I was a little harsh with her, wasn't I?
Come morning I rose, said goodbye to the four adults, and left the house. Why only four, you ask? Victoria wanted nothing to do with seeing me. When Beatrice went to fetch her, she fussed and sulked and refused to come out. So I took my leave of everyone but Victoria and set off for the station.
Oddly enough — whether people actually commute from here, or have some other errand, I couldn't say — a few figures stand about the otherwise empty station. I was heading in when someone I took for an attendant came over and asked whether I meant to buy a ticket. Right. There was that, wasn't there.
I held out the card I'd been given yesterday and asked if there was any way to contact the person on it. I was only checking whether a royal transit pass might be within reach, but the attendant, regrettably, shook his head. A letter, perhaps. From here, there was no way to reach them directly.
Mm. Nothing else for it, then. I'll have to walk. I remember the road — not that I mean to walk all the way to the capital. I'll go as far as a city large enough to get a message through, contact the military, and reach the capital that way. I took the card back, walked straight out of the station, and turned my steps toward the city.
It is the dead of winter. At this hour in summer the sun would already be well up the sky, but now it is still dawn, and at that hour I stepped into the forest. Had I not known the way, I would have followed the railway, but considering the direction, the train never passes through the nearest city. So I chose to walk. Keep on without rest, and I ought to reach the city by this evening.
I had barely gone any distance at all before every trace of civilization vanished at a stroke, leaving only the marks of vehicles coming and going. Not so much as a paved surface — dirt and gravel, and weeds sprung up through the gaps. Morning or not, the forest is still dark. The trees rise so high that the light hardly gets in, and the deeper I go, the more often lights show themselves around me. There are more of them than in the city. Lights the size of a person, of course, are almost nowhere to be found, and warmth is just as scarce. If a city is a plain with torches set down here and there, then the forest is a dark night sky. The light is faint, and the heat is faint, but there is no end to either.
I was walking through it when, around the time the trunks had grown as thick as I am tall, someone called to me. At first I thought the voice came from the forest. It didn't. Farther away — a very long way off. Not a planet, not a galaxy, but outside the universe itself. An entirely different world is calling me. So I caught hold of that call and pulled. Unlike the times I lie beneath the surface, what I feel now is the sensation of being dragged sideways.
Clank.
Chains? I can't see outside. No — I can't see what's in front of me. I seem to have eyes, and since a faint light shows around me, I'm not blind; there must be something like a blindfold. Bell, of course, is still walking the forest. I watch every harvester at the same time in any case, so slipping into another body doesn't stop a single one of them.
No — more than that, my stomach feels strangely heavy, and I have the sense that I possess no arms and no legs. There's nothing inside this head. Have I entered an artificially made body again, the way I did with Bell?
Then I heard a strange sound. No. By the cadence of it, this is language. Someone is speaking to me. But I have no harvester who knows the tongue, so I can't understand a word. Through the mondegreen effect it resembles words I know, and yet the sense of it is wrong, which means it must be a language I don't. This one.
I tried to move.
Clank. With the sound of iron striking iron, pain spreads from every direction. Something catches along the backbone — metal needles, by the feel of them, driven in the length of the spine. Shall I make a human body of this, as it stands? No. I'll watch a little longer. From the state of things I seem to be in the position of a laboratory animal, and if I reveal myself carelessly, I may well ruin everything later.
That aside, a violent pain stabs through the body, and then the signal changes, and pleasure drives in from every side. It is strangely stronger than any pleasure an ordinary living thing can feel, so there must be some special device at work. Are the tubes sunk into this spine that device? Follow the lay of the body, and it does seem to have been human once. There are no arms or legs. Something is driven into the spine, and into the head as well, and tubes are plugged in all over me.
Who drives things like this into a body they mean to summon? Pain and pleasure, handed over by turns — they're running an experiment. So I waited for the moment the pain began, and opened my mouth.
It isn't the language of this world. Even so, if I keep talking, they'll do something on their end. I don't speak at random, of course. I speak on purpose, at the instant the pain starts. That way it sounds as if I'm forcing the words out because I can't bear it, doesn't it?
What I took for torture went on after that. Sometimes the pitch of the pain changed. Sometimes they mixed pleasure in, or gave me pleasure alone. But I say the same thing every time. I have already arrived in that world. Even if I die, so long as a corpse remains, I can regenerate. And the body called Bell is still there, just as it was.
Being experimented on like this is a first. They're the only ones experimenting, so surely I'm allowed an experiment of my own?
For a considerable while, then, I was the subject. Each time, I said the same words. When they spoke to me, I said the same words. Offer the same line over and over, and the other side will try some different interaction. What I'm waiting for is the moment, in the course of that, when they touch this body. Touch it, and I touch them. Then I can set the barrier of language aside and make my will known — and after that, I'll try for a contract. Once is enough. Regeneration and enhancement are not easy things for a living creature to escape.
At the end of that long wait, the warmth of something alive touched me at last. The instant I felt it against the surface of my face, I recited the words of the contract. But instead of an answer, they rustled at something on my head. And my sight came open.
What meets my eyes is a space like an underground cell. A dark room of stacked brick, and on every side a glow I take for magic circles. Within them sits a familiar figure. Yasle's art.
No. Hmm?
A great deal of it differs from the memories Yasle carries. I can't tell whether someone happened to make a similar thing, or whether they took Yasle's method of summoning and rebuilt it to suit themselves. The first world has already perished, at least, so this isn't that. Perhaps it only happens to look alike.
In any case, I looked the place over and then raised my eyes farther ahead. A little way off, a man is looking down at me. Edema bloats his face, and his back is hunched. He looks like a wicked wizard walked straight out of a fairy tale. Is he the one who called me? He's much too far away, though, to have been the one who removed my blindfold.
There's someone else. I turn my gaze and find a woman looking down at me, pale to an uncanny degree. The blindfold is in her hand, so she was the one who undid it. She said something to the man. He was silent for a moment, then spoke to her in turn, and she simply drew away from where she stood.
I try my arms and legs.
Clatter. Clatter. Chains, moving. The man shouts something in a rush, and the pain spreads again. I let the body clench on reflex and take stock of what state I'm in. The arms and legs are severed high up and joined again with chain, and the chains run to the ceiling. A pig, butchered in full — that is what I am. Strange marks are drawn here and there across the skin. And the truly peculiar thing is the abdomen. Ah. There's a living creature in here. No light, though, and no warmth. Leave it, and it will rot where it sits. I'm not cast out merely because the flesh dies, so I don't particularly mind.
A little later, the pain stopped. The body hangs slack, and fluid and blood — reflex, perhaps — run in streams down my face. They did nothing beyond that. Because I had spoken to the woman, and the woman had told the man?
I was hanging there, watching, when several women with the very same face came walking in, and between them they carried a man whose limbs were bent into ruin. A necklace huge enough to hide his whole throat hangs at his neck. I'll call him the prisoner, to keep things simple. The one who had been trying something on me, I'll call the wizard. The wizard says a word, and the identical women drag the prisoner up in front of me. The one at the very front lifts his arm and makes him touch me.
I take that instant and recite the contract. He doesn't answer. From behind, the wizard lets out a great roar.
"Kraaaaaagh!"
The prisoner seizes the necklace and screams. Aha. The same thing they're using on me, most likely. He thrashes as if under electric torture, and before long he goes limp. The wizard barks another order; the woman slaps his cheek and wakes him, then lifts his arm and makes him touch me again. The moment skin meets skin, I recite the contract. And the prisoner accepts.
Soon his body swells. His skin turns to porcelain, then flakes away little by little, and a pure white shows underneath. The twisted limbs settle back, clean, into what they were. Skin that had been somewhat dark goes white, and his hair turns purple — that, too.
Made whole, he moves at once and drives a fist into the head of the woman beside him. There is a wet crunch. Her skull caves in, and what was inside it spatters out. Dead on the spot.
Having killed the woman right next to him, he turns and runs straight for the wizard. He doesn't get more than a few steps. The necklace at his throat lights up and explodes — one of those bomb collars, the sort that linger in a faded memory. Blood and gobbets of flesh spray in every direction. The severed head rises toward the ceiling, then falls to the floor.
A harvester died. Not the first, though. The women with the same face, standing beside me now — their contracts are already finished. Descendants, that is, of some harvester made long ago. Or replicas of one. I'll save that for later. For now I look at the wizard, and this time I ask in the language of this world.