Part 8 (1/2)
He'd arrived one cold morning not more than three years past, and his daughter had repaid his paternal affection with her own brand of filial concern: she'd had him body-bound and shackled and tortured to death, daily, ever since. That wasn't unnerving to Tam, not in the least-on the contrary, it would have been out of character for a daughter of the Cicatrix to treat her human parent with anything approaching human civility, let alone warmth. No, it was the elder Thyu's tacit acceptance of his fate that terrified Tam-each dawn Lallowe slipped into the second dressing chamber's privy and spent the better part of the morning inventing new ways to murder her papa. And each day Hinto Thyu voiced the same request before he expired: Tell my daughter that her father loves her.
The worst thing was, Tam thought the old man meant it.
Evidently Tam's guess had been correct-the marchioness meant for Tam to attend her inside the privy this morning, rather than listen to the screaming muted through three rooms and four doors of blessed insulation and as much lutesong as his fingers could muster. Well, so be it. He'd lived through worse, hadn't he? If his mistress wanted him to take a personal interest in her guests, wasn't it his duty to accommodate her? That was his purpose, after all.
Lallowe strode into the room and crossed the distance to the privy door before Tam could blink. He picked up the wretched valise and followed the marchioness into the small enclosed s.p.a.ce, trying to remember to breathe but shocked nevertheless by what he saw.
The night had been kind to Hinto Thyu. He was still dead when Tam slid back the doorway to admit his mistress- a ragged fringe of white hair veiling the old man's face, the sinews of his emaciated body still in the process of st.i.tching themselves back together. Just a few slices of flesh remained unhealed, but they no longer bled freely-he would be waking soon. Watching a body-bound corpse heal itself demanded an iron stomach-and it made Tam uncomfortable to think that a similar enchantment chained his own spirit to his body.
”Tell . . .” the old man croaked, jerking to life in midsentence; no doubt he had been repeating his message to his daughter when she slit his throat the day before. Hinto Thyu coughed and spat out a piece of his tongue. Not so dead after all. Tam oughtn't to be surprised at that- though he'd never say so aloud, Tam saw something of the father's resilience in the daughter. The same stubborn refusal to bend to reality-Lallowe reflected her father, but twisted and ugly as was the way of these latter-day fey. It was remarkable that there was anything of him in her at all.
”Tell my daughter . . .” he began again, but never finished. Lallowe glided across the chamber-skirting the gore-filled bathing pool brewing rot in the center of the floor-and slapped the words from her father's mouth.
”No more of that, Papa,” she almost whispered, stroking her father's cheek where her turquoise nails had drawn blood. ”We've heard quite enough about your feelings.”
”If only that could be true, Lolly.” Hinto Thyu matched his daughter's gentle tone. ”I don't believe you've truly heard a word about love in your whole impoverished life.”
A second slap rang off the silvered walls of the privy. Tam stared unflinchingly at the dogwoods painted on the silver walls.
”Drivel. Drivel, doggerel, and defamation, that's all you've ever been capable of, Papa. If you call me by that insulting diminutive a second time, I'll have you bled dry again.” That had been a long week, Tam remembered, thinking of the howls that had faded day by day into awful silence. And the faces of the laundresses who'd had to bleach a week's worth of b.l.o.o.d.y washrags. Exsanguinations were no holiday.
Lallowe held up something for her father to see: the gold device she'd spent so much time examining since she'd opened it, deactivating it in the process. Bits of dried dragonfly wing still stuck to its inner sh.e.l.l.
”What's this, another bauble for the jewel of my heart?” The old man smiled through a mouthful of broken teeth. ”You have so many lovely things.”
”Something more. Something less, too, now that I've opened it. But I think, Papa, that you already knew that.” She shook her head as if to clear it, and Tam wondered, not for the first time, about Lallowe Thyu's state of mind. These escapades didn't seem to satisfy her as once they had.
Hinto Thyu almost smiled. ”I know only the enormity of my own ignorance, poppet. Mine and yours.”
”Of course you do. Philosophical gibberish aside, Papa, I believe that you recognize this device, or at least the principles of its design.” She lifted the lid with a nail to show him the remains of the dragonfly. Did the old man flinch? How his daughter wanted to wound him. How she'd tried. ”A beautiful machine powered by an insect. Much like Mother's womb must have felt after you seeded it with me.”
”Yes, yes. I am small and insignificant. I am less than nothing.”
”Truer words, never spoken.” Lallowe sat on a tall stool and crossed her legs at the knee.
”Which begs the question: what are you?”
Lallowe twitched a devastating eyebrow.
But Hinto just shrugged, as best he could hanging from manacles. ”Ah, you are greater than I will ever be, lotus of my loin. Perhaps you are embarra.s.sed to have such a n.o.body for a father?”
Lallowe rested her hands in her lap and fixed her father with a searching look. ”I'll be honest with you, Father: for the last three years I've been trying to decide the answer to that very question. Why indeed would I spend a moment's thought on the jumped-up minstrel du jour that Mother tapped for a seed donor? What possessed me to spare a single thought for a discarded stud horse that didn't even merit a proper expulsion from Mother's court?
”But in the last few days I've learned something, Papa, which explains the remarkable apt.i.tude of my foresight. I've learned that great things can be fueled by the least significant of lives.” She slipped the dragonfly corpse from its golden coffin and dangled it before her father's eyes.
”Yes,” he agreed. ”As your great rage has been fueled by mine. My least significant life.”
No response. The wings of the erstwhile insect danced in the exhalations from Lallowe's flared nostrils. Tam watched blood dry on dogwood petals.
”Maybe I've misbehaved, Papa.” She considered, inspecting the play of light across her turquoise nails. ”Instead of tickling you with my steel feathers here, maybe you'd prefer to play the audience while I round up some innocents to tickle instead? Since you don't feel like talking, perhaps I could inspire you to write a new folio of verse? Pain informs art, I'm told. Yes, let's drag in a babe to torture instead. You may watch.”
Hinto Thyu sagged further into his chains. ”I'll tell you what you want to know, Lolly, but not because I'm moved by your tantrums. I'll tell you because you are my daughter and I love you; I will always love you, no matter how you deform your heart.”
”Fabulous.” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. If his words affected her, she did not show it, instead shaking the broken cabochon in her father's face and demanding, ”Now what is this?”
”It's called a 'vivisistor,' poppet, and it produces an electric current derived from the slow death of the living thing trapped inside it.”
”That is its function. Vivisistor.” She tasted the word. ”What is its significance?”
”What's significant about generating power from life? Oh poppet, you ask all the right questions, but in the wrong order. You should feel horror where you feel only ambition, and I worry that if you do not feel it now at the beginning as you should, then you will feel it at the last, when it is too late for you to save yourself, and that breaks my worthless heart.” Tam thought the old man looked as if he meant it. He seemed sincere, at least.
Lallowe hissed through her teeth. ”Don't fence with me now that you've begun to cooperate, Papa; we're past that. There's nothing remarkable about a battery, no matter how it generates current. There's more to this 'vivisistor' than electricity, and I want to know what it is.”
” 'I want, I want, I want.' That's all you know. It's my fault, I suppose, for not supplementing your mother's instruction with a modic.u.m of the decency that is your human birthright.” He drew breath to continue, but his daughter denied him the opportunity.
The third slap stung Lallowe's palm, and Hinto Thyu was not so quick to raise his head this time. When he did, their matching eyes met and neither gave an inch of ground.
”Do you feel better?” he asked her, very softly. ”Does hurting me lessen the burden of your pain, my darling girl? If it does, I will gladly dangle here forever.”
Lallowe cursed in faerie-tongue, obscene birdsong chiming the air. ”Why do you torment me?” she demanded, a thread of shrillness in her voice betraying the girl she must once have almost been. ”And where did Mother find it?”
Hinto Thyu looked down at his tortured carca.s.s. He tried to shrug, but his brutalized muscles wouldn't permit it. ”Because I am a terrible father, I suppose.” Then, tears in his failing eyes, he broke.
”Your mother uncovered the technology de cades ago, shortly before the troubles with Death began.” He paused, watching his daughter's face. Tam could not imagining feeling anything but fear for Lallowe Thyu, but this man only ever offered love. Did he know how that would torture her? Was the father as cruel, in his way, as the child?
” 'Troubles with Death.' So you know about that, do you?” It was a cheap question-anyone paying half a mind to the foot traffic in the City Unspoken would notice that the ranks of the Dying swelled daily. But no one seemed to be paying half a mind these days; there was a frantic energy, a distraction in the air.
Hinto kept quiet, though his face looked woeful. Three years of dying daily, he'd kept his secrets. Tam did not think that Hinto Thyu would ever spill them all.
Lallowe pressed a nail against the thin skin above her father's collarbone, hard enough to draw blood. ”I knew you knew more than you let on, but not why. Why do you know so much, Papa? Did Mother tell you this, so long ago, before you left us?”
Her father looked at the floor when he answered, staring down at his own blood, both dried and fresh. ”I don't hate your mother, Lallowe. I don't wish her harm-that, and I worry that the harm will not be limited to the Cicatrix alone. Please murder me again, but promise me that when the moment comes, you will save yourself.”
She promised him nothing but pain, and kept her word. The old man bellowed.
”You're leaving something out.” Lallowe brushed his whis kers, now, mimicking tenderness as best she could. ”Keep your sources if you'd rather scream than sing, but tell me what you know of the devices. Finish this.”
”The vivisistor combines several arcane disciplines with some technological fields that should not be compatible with one another, let alone with spellwork. Perhaps you might meditate further upon the implications of such a feat.”
”Perhaps I might do, but I'd consider it a courtesy if my Papa would finish the bedtime tale he's begun.” She picked his skin out from beneath her bright nails.
Hinto sobbed and it seemed as though all the strength drained out of his body and into the cesspool at his feet. ”I would expect no less from my darling girl. If I tell you that the vivisistors are nothing new, but something very old, and exceedingly dangerous, will you abandon your mother's madness? I think not. And what if I tell you that the magics and sciences combined within the vivisistor seem to arise from disparate universes? Will you see reason and leave the folly of ancient madness to proper fools?”
Lallowe's eyes opened wide. ”Mother works with technology from multiple realities? Successfully?”
Hinto nodded imperceptibly. ”Multiple realities, yes. Successfully? Well that, as always, depends on your definition.”
”Oh Papa,” she breathed, considering the ramifications of successful duplication and integration of technology from several worlds at once. Tech from one world rarely worked on another-and conflicting magic systems could be even worse. Syncretistic innovation, truly building upon the resources of the metaverse-that kind of synthesis had always been deemed a myth. Even in places like the City Unspoken, where worlds mixed on the streets.
”Your mother . . .” The old bard's voice was hoa.r.s.e. ”You don't have to become her, Lolly. There are as many possible futures as there are skies sheltering suns. Even the Cicatrix was beautiful, once, like a bower of daffodils. You remember her, don't you? Before the scars. Before derangement, before she changed her name. Before the vivisistors she had installed within her own body.”