The need to see them had crept up on him like a slow fever, but now had firm hold. He licked his lips and skulked down the hall, hoping his sisters were asleep. He hadn't the strength to fight with them again. He just wanted to make certain they were there, confirm that his grip was not slipping from everything, that he still controlled something.
As he neared the door he walked with a furtive tread, as if approaching a sleeping beast. He put his ear to the enspelled wooden slab but heard nothing from within. After composing his mental defenses, he took the charmed brass key from the folds of his tunic, whispered a word of awakening over it, and with it opened the lock. When he heard the soft click, when he felt the wards subside, he pulled it open.
Fetid, organic air wafted forth. He imagined it loamy with ideas, carrying thoughts on unseen currents, freefloating notions waiting for someone to bump into them and think them their own. Sometimes after leaving his sisters he wondered whether the thoughts he carried with him were his own or something they'd pushed into his mind.
Could they even do that? He didn't know for certain.
And how would he know? Did a thought of theirs in his head feel different than a thought of his own?
He shook his head to clear it of such thinking.
He leaned into the room and could have touched the back of the enormous, bald eunuch who stood guard just within. The barrel-shaped man wore tentsized pantaloons and a shirt and leather jack stained with sweat. A wooden truncheon hung from his belt, a large curved knife, and a reel of thin line.
The eunuch did not acknowledge Rakon's presence, though he must have heard the door open. His eyes stayed on the room, as they should. He was a jailer, his sole duty to ensure that Rusilla and Merelda neither left their chamber nor harmed anyone or themselves.
A slit at the base of the eunuch's skull still seeped pink pus, the wound a consequence of Rakon's chirurgy. Perhaps it would never heal. After scalpel and spell had severed the eunuch's brain from body, Rakon had filled the fleshy shell with a memory eater. The incorporeal spirit controlled the body with intangible tendrils while it made a slow meal of the eunuch's memories. In exchange for a captive feast, the eater allowed a binding that made it a perpetual guardian for Rusilla and Merelda, its alien intelligence immune to their mind magic.
Rakon wondered in passing how much of the eunuch still existed. He hoped none, though he could not help but imagine the eunuch's consciousness caged in the cell of his own mind, railing at his captivity. He could think of few worse fates than a magical bifurcation, the slow death of a mind in a body no longer controllable by it.
"Are they asleep?" he whispered in the eunuch's ear.
The huge man did not turn. The memory eater caused the eunuch to shrug.
Embers from the large hearth cast the windowless chamber in soft light and deep shadows. Furs and polished woods abounded: twin beds, wardrobes, overstuffed chairs.
He did what he could to provide for their comfort.
The aftermath of a chess match sat on the small gaming table, the white king toppled. Rusilla always played black, and she won nine games of ten. Rakon hadn't played her in years. He'd given up trying to beat her when she'd still been a precocious adolescent.
His sisters lay in their beds, their backs to him, their forms lost in a mound of pillows and blankets. Rusilla's long hair made an auburn cloud on her bolster. He watched them for a time, noted the steady breathing that suggested they were asleep. He let himself relax, and the moment he did he tasted cinnamon and his thoughts scattered.
Why had he come to see his sisters anyway? He could not remember. In truth, he'd been unfair to them over the years and should—
His adrenaline spiked.
Those weren't his thoughts.
How long had he been standing in the doorway?
He recovered enough of his wits to recognize the velvety caress of Rusilla's mental touch in his mind.
She hadn't moved, her breathing hadn't changed, but her mental fingers were sifting through his mind, pulling on the threads of his thinking, searching his memories.
He grimaced, clutching his head, and took an involuntary step backward.
"Get… out," he said through gritted teeth, but still she clung to his mind, a cognitive leech, violating him.
He fought for clarity, thought of arcane formulae that his sister would not be able to parse, flooded his mind with them, incanted in the Language of Creation. When he felt her recoil at the alienness of the words and formulae, he reasserted his mental defenses, strengthened them.
The cinnamon taste faded. She was out.
He winced at the headache the contact had left in her wake. Each beat of his heart put a knife stab of pain in his temple. He wiped his nose and the finger came away bloodstained.
"I will punish you if you do that again," he said, his words loud in the silence of the chamber.
Rusilla shifted her legs under the covers but still did not show him her face.
"What could you do that's worse than what you've already done? That's worse than what you already plan to do?"
He growled in response, low and menacing, massaging his temple with two fingers.
"You might be surprised," he said.
"He does, you know," Rusilla said. He still could not see her face and it discomfited him.
Rakon licked his lips and lowered his hand. "He who? Does what?"
"The eunuch, or what's left of him. He screams in his head. It's constant. He hates you for imprisoning him in his own body."
The memory eater caused the eunuch to turn his head, so Rakon could see him in profile, and smiled. The expression did not reach the empty, glazed eyes.
Rakon swallowed, looked away.
"Just as we hate you for imprisoning us in our own house," Rusilla said. "Would you like to hear them? The screams?"
Merelda giggled viciously from somewhere within her blankets.
"I don't need to hear them," Rakon said. "I did what had to be done with him and I'm content with that. I'll do what has to be done with both of you also."
"And will you be content with that, too?" Rusilla asked softly.
Concealed in the shadows and blankets, Merelda said, "We're your sisters, Rakon."
"I know that," Rakon said. He clasped his hands behind his back. "And I'm sorry. But you're Norristru. And this is the Norristru house, the Norristru line, and I can't let it fall." He put finality in his tone. "The Pact preserves us all. You'll both do what you were born to do."
"It's not what I was born to do!" Merelda said, stirring under her covers.
"It is," Rakon insisted, and tried to put brotherly affection in his voice, though even he heard the falsity in it. "It's what must be. You both know that. You've both known it for years."
"You confuse what must be with your wishes," Rusilla said. "You enjoy the power that comes with your position. Lord Adjunct to the Lord Mayor."
She made his title sound like an insult. How did she even know his title? He'd never told her and she hadn't left the manse in over a decade. It occurred to him that the entire exchange could have been taking place only in his head.
"Sit up," he said. "Let me see you when you speak."
They ignored him.
"I said sit up."
"We heard you," Merelda said. "But we defy you."
He stared at their beds, at their backs.
"Will you punish us now, brother?" Rusilla said.
He shook his head, bewildered by their intransigence. "I can't understand you, either of you. The Pact is everything. You must know that."
Rusilla's voice dripped scorn. "The Pact was made by Norristru men for Norristru men. Yet it's the women who are asked to understand."
"And made to suffer," Merelda added.
Rakon had heard it all before, sometimes filtered through tears, sometimes through anger, sometimes through threats, sometimes in his dreams. As always, he remained unmoved.
"If you force me to take harsher steps, I will. I don't wan
t to, but if I must, I'll manacle both of you to your beds. I'll drug you. You need only be alive, nothing more. You know I'm capable of it."
"Oh, I've been in your head, brother," Rusilla said. "I know quite well what you're capable of."
The memory eater inhabiting the eunuch found Rusilla's words amusing, or perhaps it devoured something funny in the eunuch's past. The great body shook as it chuckled.
"Try what you will," Merelda said. "We'll fight."
"The first time is always the worst," Rakon said, repeating words he'd heard from someone or other since childhood. "It will go easier after that."
"How would you know?" Rusilla said.
Rakon'd had enough. He'd come to see them to remind himself, and them, that his grip over them was still strong. But he was leaving with it weaker than it had been before he'd opened the door. They were more dangerous than he'd realized.
"Go to sleep now. It's late."
"Yes, it is," Rusilla said.
"When you do your duty, I'll reward you. I promise."
"Words," Rusilla said, dismissively. "Mere words."
He backed out of the room, closed the door and relocked it from the outside. He spoke the words to the master charm to reactivate the wards.
His hands were shaking. The headache remained. He was sweating. He rested his brow and hands against the smooth wood, worry rooting deeply in his gut.
The sylph's words replayed in his mind, the wind articulating a problem he must solve lest all of them die.
But he didn't know how.
Or did he?
An idea bubbled to the forefront of his mind and he was taken with it immediately. He should have thought of it before.
Hope buoyed his spirit. There was much work to do, and very little time, but he could do it in fifteen days. He could.
His mind made up, he lifted his head from the door, turned, and was startled to find himself face to face with the scarred, wrinkled visage of his mother. His startled gasp embarrassed him.
"I will put a bell on you, Mother. Don't sneak around so."
The clumps of his mother's gray hair stuck out in all directions from her veined, spotted scalp. Her left eye, drooping under the weight of an old scar, fixed on him. Her nightrobe hung from her emaciated frame as it might from a bundle of sticks.
"I was looking for a servant," she said, her broken voice like grating stones.
"They're not allowed in this part of the house," Rakon reminded her.
She seemed to have little interest in his words, and looked past him to his sisters' door. "They're restful in sleep."
"They're not asleep," he said, deflecting the point of her question. With the Thin Veil so near, Rusilla and Merelda should've been experiencing nightmares.
Her rheumy eyes turned vacant, seeing not the present but something in her past.
"The dreams started for me the month I first bled and continued through the first…" She visibly shuffled through her mind for the right euphemism. "… visitation."
She continued to stare off into space, living through her history, the wrinkles on her face a map of past pain.
"Mother," Rakon said. "Mother."
She snapped back to the present, her eyes fixing on him. "Yes, well. As I was saying, things are what they are. Norristru men sacrifice their seed, the women their wombs." She looked past him to the door, as if speaking to Rusilla and Merelda. "The first time is always the worst."
It comforted him to hear his mother echo his thinking, to hear her validate the history of their house. If she could accept the price of the Pact, why couldn't his sisters?
"I birthed six children before you and your sisters, Rakon," she said. "Did you know that?"
He hadn't known. The house bred secrets and facts unspoken. "Were they… stillborn?"
She shook her head. "They were born alive, but fiendish in appearance. The Thyss claimed them for… such ends as the Lords of Hell intend."
Over the years the Thyss had been claiming more and more of the offspring from the Pact. And yet House Thyss evidently had only one true son still living, and he was imprisoned on Ellerth. Perhaps their house was dying, too.
His mother's voice drew his thoughts back to the hall.
"The three children of human appearance that I bore are more than any women in this house has birthed in four generations. If your sisters are equally fertile, we'll soon be strong with heirs again."
Words exited Rakon's mouth as if of their own accord, his mother a magnet for his worry. "A herald has not come."
His mother's bloodshot eyes widened; her hand went to her chest. "What? A herald should have come to you days ago to prepare the way."
"Do you think I don't know?" Rakon snapped.
"What could be wrong? I don't understand, Rakon. Have you given offense to the Thyss somehow?"
"No, of course not."
"But the Thin Veil will occur later this month. If a herald hasn't come, then Vik-Thyss won't come–"
"Vik-Thyss is dead."
He might as well have slapped her. Her face paled. Her hand went to her mouth as the implications settled on her. She spoke in a small voice. "The Pact will fail, Rakon."
"I know. I–"
She lunged forward with surprising speed. Her bony hands closed on his robe and pulled him close. Her strength took him momentarily aback. Her breath, filtered through her rotting teeth, made him blanch.
"Our lives depend upon the Pact, boy! We have made too many enemies over the centuries, enemies much more dangerous than the members of the Merchants' Council – inhuman enemies. Even the spirits we use to do our bidding do so only because of the Pact."
"My binding spells also–"
"Your binding spells work on sprites and sylphs and trivial creatures! But the powerful spirits, the demons, they answer you only because of the Pact. And they are vengeful, Rakon."
"I know that, Mother!"
"You know it, you say? Then you know they will come for you, for me! They await only an opportunity! You must do something!"
"I'm going to," he said. "But right now I need to think. Go back to your quarters, Mother. Leave me be."
But she didn't go. She pointed with her chin at Rusilla and Merelda's door. "Do they know?"
"Of course not. I told them nothing."
"You don't have to tell them for them to know."
The accumulation of fear, frustration, and anger routed Rakon's self-control. He seized his mother by her stick-thin shoulders and shoved her against the wall.
"I know that, too! But remember that it was you who birthed them, you who brought mindmages into our house. They needn't even use the Language of Creation! Their thoughts are weapons!"
His mother sneered, her rotted teeth like old tombstones. She looked at him from under hooded eyes. "A woman's thoughts are always weapons. And all men are monsters in their hearts."
He snarled and steered her roughly down the hallway. "Leave me, Mother. I have plans to make if I'm to save our lives."
Rusilla lay on her side, staring at Merelda's back across the gap of fur-covered wood floor that separated their beds. Her head felt muzzy, thick, her thoughts ponderous. The throbbing beat of her heart seemed intent on pushing her eyes out of her face. Merelda rolled over to face her.
Your nose, Merelda projected, the thought sweet with concern.
Rusilla dabbed her nose and the knuckle came away bloody. It's nothing.
"It's not nothing," Merelda said aloud, sitting up in bed.
The eunuch grunted and shifted on his feet, tense at Merelda's tone.
"Are we not allowed to speak except in the presence of my brother, eater?" Merelda snapped.
The eunuch – the memory eater – grinned stupidly. His breathing sounded heavy, wet. The consciousness of the actual eunuch continued his screams, mental wails bouncing against the walls of Rusilla's mental barricades.
Speak only through our thoughts, Rusilla projected, though the effort intensified her headache. I don't want him to
hear.
Merelda glared at the eunuch, her eyes narrowed with anger. The firelight cast her delicate features in shadow. With her pale skin, long neck, and short dark hair, she somehow made Rusilla think of a swan.
I have learned something from Rakon, Rusilla projected.
You read him? Merelda's mental tone held admiration.
She'd done more than read him. She'd copied memories from his mind, held them even now in her own. And she'd pushed, too, inserting thoughts into her brother's head.