Impovulosi

Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Sun Aug 26, 2018 7:36 am

Get up!

Bruidda’s voice, in her head.

The memory of lying in cold sloppy mud on a spring day, rain pattering her eyelids and all the wind knocked out of her from a hard throw—Bruidda’s damn favorite hip-toss that she liked to employ just to remind Fionn that being taller didn’t mean Bruidda couldn’t sling her around. She had just enough time to open her eyes and see the grey sky churning over her, to feel frustrated at her own foolishness for falling for the same perfectly obvious feint she’d fallen for last time, before Bruidda dropped on her like a rockslide, planted a chunky knee on her chest, and, in lieu of a dirk, drew her dirty thumbnail across Fionn’s throat. Fine, then. You’re dead.

I slipped! The ground here’s all muck!

No one’s going to give you a moment to get your feet out of fair play, Lady. Now come on—

Then the weight would lift from her chest. Bruidda’s warm square hand would clap in her own. She’d peel her from the puddle and they’d start again.

The most vivid part of the memory was the mud, so cold that it might have been snow.

She was cold now: skin tight with gooseflesh and nipples shriveled to knots, shivering even as the summer air pressed down like a wet wool blanket. Her skin tingled, sensibility rapid returning to her extremities, but she still felt stunned clear down to the waist, unable even to rake her wild sunburst of frizzy hair out of her face to see what came next. There was enough strength in her good left arm to push herself to her elbow before the limb went numb and stupid and spilled her onto the alley’s floor again. Dagger on her calf and she could bend one leg enough to bring it in reach, but her fingers wouldn’t close. She wallowed, a mermaid caught in the net of her own hair.

The vibration of footsteps in the stone, growing louder, coming nearer, gave her enough strength for a final heave before the foot rocked her onto her back.

Not human. That was clear enough, and possibly all Gloria would need to see. Broad, brown, heart-shaped face with jutting cheekbones that looked as if they should slice through the skin, a stubborn cleft knob of a chin. Lips so dark they were nearly violet. Elongated ears to frame the face. Long limbs like a good racehorse, broad shoulders like a young hostler’s, a tiny muscular pot belly flexing beneath the green silk as even now she struggled to rise, anything better than dying on her back like a damn trapped turtle.

But nothing human had those eyes.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 26, 2018 9:20 am

Take a human, and smear the paint of her canvas with a damp palm: that was this creature, who now was not the Other Woman from before. To look upon that face from above dizzied her. Those features, alien and unsettling, looked less like a living being's and more like an ornate decoration given animation — a statue, perhaps, or a misshapen clay figurine passed down through generations and spoken over with coddling reverence. Offer a myth some of its own flesh, ask an addled child to form the perfect specimen of life from human from clay, and this would be the result: a creature that balanced on the thin line between imagination and authenticity.

And here it was, black-eyed, breathing, sharing air, staring at her.

"My mind," Gloria Wynsee said, her lips peeled back, her voice a hoarse rasp, "is my own."

The electricity of fear shot through Gloria's bones, a nervous and nauseating energy that settled in the creases of her muscles like caustic poison. This close, the human woman — tall, frightfully tall, all shoulders and forearms and belly — reeked of oiled canvas and the hot, laborious sweat sucked out of pores by hours in the daylight. The boot gave a final, discourteous nudge — or was it a wary reminder? — before it withdrew. She squatted. She never looked away. Hers were peculiar eyes, damaged by too many hours underneath a sweltering Sun. Color had been burned from them, leaving them gray as steel. The pupils, no matter how much or how little light the world possessed, never grew, never gaped.

In the alley, the world could have forgotten those two brown women.

From beneath the muddy trail of her skirt and spattered petticoats, Gloria revealed the trunk of her left leg, all its black hair and coiled muscle. Against it, where the boot-leather bit into her skin, lay a knife.

She slid it free. Metal whispered against leather. On the blade, small and straight as truth as it was, a word had been engraved: Liam.

"A woman," Gloria said, "should never be struck defenseless. Never. And one woman ought never stand idly by to let another suffer such a fate. A woman might cower, or be immobilized, or she might be so stilled with fear or confusion that — that her limbs refuse to answer her mind. But even then, she deserves agency and influence. Enough, at least, to — to make for herself a choice."

Better me than you.

She placed Liam on the cobbles beside one of the Other Woman's hands, then sat back until her spine setled against the bricks. Here, she bent her knees, and tenderly lifted the canopy of her skirts to examine the blotches of fresh red blossoming on the knees of her petticoats. She peeled aside torn fabric, and dabbed with her thumb at the patch of pink, wet skin where cobbles had gnawed into her flesh.

When she touched her skin, her teeth jerked shut, and she hissed at the stinging pain.

"My mind is my own, and this is my choice: to not brutalize a vulnerable body," Gloria Wynsee said, "and to allow you to choose the next path, however ill you may be. Liam's good, Rabbit. Liam's fine. He'll either keep you safe as we speak out the truth of whatever exists between us, or," the Jerno reasoned, "he'll give you one final chance — and a true one it ought to be — to rid yourself of me.

"Perhaps you'll fare better than you did against a fence."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Mon Aug 27, 2018 5:34 am

Faster than seemed possible—faster even than she thought herself capable, as if her limbs worked on instinct entirely separate from her own will—her fingers contracted to a fist and her whole arm jerked back from the knife. Somehow in an extension of the same movement, she rolled over and coiled into a crouch, knee under chin, hands braced like a sprinter’s, bedraggled hair dangling to the ground: first flat on her back, then not. The air around her was soaked with fear-sweat and the sweet oil that dressed her hair. Glams all flown and forsaken her, back iron-scored, a fierce agony like a cold brand; chest conversely on fire but neither of the two extremes canceling the other out. Her chest heaved from the suddenness, and her breath wheezed and rattled, the loudest thing about her.

The blankness in her face betrayed no hostility, no fear, no comprehension. Gloria could have given the same speech to an injured deer with its hoof trapped in a hole and received only the same bottomless stare.

The scrape of iron on stone reverberated in her back teeth. Ugly, pitted, it emitted a palpable cold malice. She became all too conscious of the sweat-slicked niche at the base of her throat, the v that flashed as she breathed. That was where the point would go. It didn’t need Gloria’s hand to drive it; it might rise under the power of its own deadly enmity and fly for her face.

Gloria’s words largely swept over her like a heavy rain, but a flicker of understanding crossed her empty features. The gesture of laying down one’s weapon was ancient, unmistakable. It was something she’d done before; it was something that had been done for her many times, the momentary humbling and vulnerability of the exposed back of the neck in kneeling to lay the claidheamh crosswise at her feet, one’s intentions laid down along with the weapon. One rejected it at one’s own peril.

Resentment, frustration, the sense of entrapment, all doubled at being so bound. Now the impetus was on her.

One day, she thought hard at Gloria’s forehead, you’ll remember that I tried to run, but you had to follow. I tried to end this before it began and you wouldn’t let me. You’ll remember.

The rustling of Gloria’s skirt caused her to start. Something about the way the woman touched the raw sores with dirty fingers, the strange satisfaction in her hiss, filled her with irrational anger; she wanted to swat Gloria’s hands away from herself.

Her face subtly tightened, the lower jaw jutting. The eyes regained their focus as her hand swept out, disdainful and dismissive, her fingertips flicking at the knife’s handle so that it flipped back toward Gloria. “No.

Even through the thin scale of her black fingernails, the iron burned, and she snatched her hand back to warm it between her breasts.

“Tha go,” she managed through her teeth. “I go. Leave be. No…” The word drained away with a hiss, fury and frustration. “No between, no—” She pressed her hand tighter to her breastbone, thrust it back toward Gloria, back to herself, describing the empty space that separated them.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Mon Aug 27, 2018 3:01 pm

"Leave you here, in the wake of some fit? To what," Gloria asked, her chin jutting forward. "Presume the day might be good to you, and grant you time to grow hale and whole? Dull as I may be, and yet more daft, I am certainly no complete fool. You are a pie on a sill, fit for flies and fingers. Should some man, some drunk, find you sprawled here without sense or composure—"

Silence. A surge of ill discomfort twisted in her stomach.

She surveyed the crumbled figure, all its struggles and attempts, its muddy clothes, its alien ears. And she frowned.

"Men take what they believe they can have. Do not demand that I forget the mechanisms of the world."

With her adrenaline subsiding, leaking into nothing, the muscles underneath her skin began to tighten, atrophy, and burn. Exhaustion swept through her. Could she have, she would have melted right there, found a crack between the cobbles and mud to sleep for hours, days, even years. The denied blade, an iron covenant avoided by those trembling fingers, spun back to her. The word Liam stared up at her. The Other Woman shrunk away from it the way she might an offending insect or a displeasing meal. And she made herself small, tiny. Bent over herself until the skin of her shoulder pressed to the tear chewed into the fabric of her dress.

The wheal shone soft and smarting and warm against that sliver of visible skin.

Gloria's attention turned to the slanted tongue of wood the Other Woman had tried to bypass. A tiny clump of green fur — woolly threads pulled out from their miniscule crosshatch — fluttered on the tip of an exposed nail, gasping and heaving in an unseen breeze.

After retrieving her boot-blade and making it vanish back beneath her skirts, Gloria cradled the angry ache in her ribs and crawled gracelessly to her feet. A dirt-girl now, with her boots crusted in drying mud, and her stark blue skirts faded dark and black by offal and silt, she was more herself, brown skin caked with smears of tarsweat, her bonnet-tongue soaked all through with foul perspiration. Only her wincey shawl, slatted blue-white, had somehow escaped the damage.

"You stand of your own volition," Gloria said, her voice hoarse and tired, "and show me you can, or I carry you. I am far less offended at the prospect of hoisting you like grain than I am at the idea of leaving you here, with your cheek in the mud."

No between, no— kept echoing in her head. Along with the image of that hand, with its comma-shaped fingers, demonstrating distance between them. Like they were just happenstance stars crashing against one another in the great Glass Sky, never to merge again.

In pain, people did not tell fine lies.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 28, 2018 7:23 am

From Gloria’s vantage, the only change was that the woman’s complexion went a ghastly grey, though her eyes remained wide-open and stunned. Gloria's reflection shone in them plain as day, but there was no seeing there.

Once there had been a seashore.

No no no no—

The booming surf striking the stones filled her ears with the hiss of foam, disorienting, erasing direction. The moon’s rim touched the far side of the sea, bloated and beautiful and bone-white, leeching the color. The world was tarnished silver with stark shadows, and the waves a black churning army marching endlessly inland.

No no no no, stop it, if you go there now, you’ll never get back, you have to stay here—

Her back ached then, as it did now, and a sharp twisted wire bound up her lungs, squeezing them shut, only lower down. Blood coming out of her mouth, then as now. A shuffling trail gouged into wet silver sand and fat meaty droplets of blood raining on her feet. She locked her jaw tight and swallowed, swallowed salty foulness, but the pain tightened, binding up her whole body, and the blood fell thicker and she couldn’t stop it or swallow it down because it wasn’t coming from her mouth. Not at all.

No no no no, you are not there, you are here, you need to be here

The sea’s rushing crossfaded into the ringing in her ears. She felt the heat of the sun beating her scalp even before the pain in her chest reasserted itself. Time, briefly overlapping, swung back toward the present, and her head snapped upward, wrenching her back into the here and now. If it had been a faint, it had been between blinks. Gloria was an empty shape, a brown wall spitting out blind, meaningless words that, as in a nightmare, she must answer, though her tongue slurred.

“Stop it, stop it. Stop it!” The volume of her own voice jolted her back to clarity. “Stop it talking! I don’t kno-o-ow!” Between frustration and the upper range of her accent, the final word stretched into a whine that stung her middle ear. She shook her head at Gloria, a stupid, struggling student nonetheless trying to follow. What did she want, what did she want? Why hadn’t the glam worked, why didn’t she just go, what did she want?

Fionn groped inside herself for that bottomless well of wonders, the glamourie, and felt nothing but the stark terror and despair when her fingers closed on nothing. All her glamouries hung from the tip of a rusty, blood-stained nail; they had seeped out of the tear in her shoulder as if she were nothing but the grain sack that held them and left not so much as a kernel to sustain her.

The iron-score itself was almost nothing next to that pain. Almost.

“I don’t…know…words,” she finally spat out, and that wasn’t right either, but it was nearer than before. Her hands knotted, nails digging through her skirts. “Tha did the harm. Tha—” Frantically she hunted the word, touched her own mouth in example, and finally, somehow, spat out the right one: “With tha mouth.”

Gods, how Glenn would gloat. No worry about getting the last word now. Why wear yourself out trying to reason her silent when all you had to do was scratch her with an iron nail and rip her lungs out through her mouth? She would have laughed if not for the taste of blood on her tongue.

If there were one more good bolt left in her, she’d pound on his door. Beg him to give up her satchel. He wouldn’t keep the prank going if he knew it was serious, would he? He wouldn’t. Had to believe he wouldn’t. If nothing else she had something he wanted; he’d want to keep her in one piece for that. Mayhap it would even be for the best. Brush aside this frail fallacy of friendship like so many cobwebs and let it be business after all. So much simpler.

But the words battered on and on like a beating that wouldn't end.

You stand.

She understood that much. Understood, too, enough of the rest to grasp that there was a threat behind it, a demand.

The smoke-black eyes narrowed, the lush mouth curled upward in a subtle smirk. Amusement? Contempt?

You command me? You? You know not what I am but you damn well know what you are: common, common as dirt, shit and squalor wrapped up in skin, so lowly that to call you vile would honor you. But I will humor you. I will favor you this once, you who are too witless to know even when you’ve been granted a privilege. I am still queen. You are still tultharian, and I am still queen.

Very slowly she shifted to her good left hand, used it as a prop to get her feet under her. Her knees wobbled as they came to bear her weight. One hip locked into place, leg stiff and braced, to keep her balance, but she stood. On her feet, she and Gloria were nearly matched in height, but posture and pride and a certain graceful carriage made her taller. With but a twist of bearing, the stained ruin of what had once been a very good green silk gown sculpted the curve of her hip, cupped her waist like a lover’s hand. Head held aloft, face alien and impossible. Shoulders back, even though it strained her chest, arms dangling almost useless at her sides. Breathing hard. Never dropping her eyes.

By the time she was done she was winded, her breath rust in her throat. She had to make her understand. One numb hand clutched at her shoulder. She tried to speak slowly, carefully, remembering all the right words. “Poison. Poi-son. Do a’ ken? Must see to. Now.”
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 28, 2018 8:36 am

Stop it, stop it, came the enraged shout, and Gloria flinched back, drawing away from those foreign, unseeing eyes, each a plane of strange, distance reflection. For a moment, they lingered elsewhere staring through her and yet seeing nothing at all

Pride. Pride was a powerful motivator, wrapped somewhere between one's sense of dignity and agency. This wounded creature overflowed with it: a cry out, to silence the world; an arrow of blame — Tha did the harm — forged in that crude, trundling accent; and finally, a struggle to find the feet, even if the broken body looked quite ready to crumble beneath the weight. Gloria Wynsee was tall, by all standards — brutish, dark, and Jerno, a hard, clay-formed statue larger in greater and height than most women — but the Other Woman was taller still, and teetered against the obstacle of her own balance like she'd been caught defenseless against a storm of dizzying blows.

Pride. Pride was a disease. It leaped like bad air, sprang from one victim to the next, and was yet too elusive and too insidious to reveal its source: one moment, it was not, and the next, it was. A shield thrown up against onslaughts from without. Gloria's own contagious pride flared in the cold glare she leveled on the woman. Here, risking her own body, chancing the wholeness of her mind! And to what, see after the health of this ungracious, thankless j'uk'ad who she was absolutely certain wove lies about her capacity to speak—

The once-seasmtress' nostrils flared, wide and gaping. A breath.

Be civil. She means no harm of it; offense is not her aim.

Even wounded dogs bit at their benefactors.

Poison. Poi-son. Do a’ ken? Must see to. Now.

The lump in Gloria's throat danced. She glanced to the mouth of the alley before taking a chance to abandon the Standard. In Jernoan, the woman's voice fell to a lower register, and her chest and shoulders snapped and moved at the sharp edges of the words. The language was as much breath, cadence, and rhythm as it was sound. If shattered glass had its own language, that was what she spoke, and it was the only tongue through which the Other Woman had managed a full sentence.

But it shed light on no answers. It offered only further mysteries. Catch. Jernoah. Glass words. Better me than you. The Black Oil.

"If poison it is, then I know of a man who might render aid. If you desire your anonymity preserved, then no doubt he will grant that wish — for a price."

Gloria Wynsee bent her elbow. It jutted out beneath her shawl. A means for support.

"You will come with me. This," said the Jerno, "is not a choice."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 28, 2018 12:22 pm

Gloria was speaking again and she tried, she really did, to pick out a word here and there but now it didn’t even sound like anything: just discordant jangling and harsh, hasty snatches of air. Not a word she could make out. She was losing everything. As if by the mere speaking of poison had awoken it, the scrape became to a persistent pulse that rivaled even the burning in her chest. It felt as if her very flesh was gaping in an effort to draw further from the iron, but only succeeding in spreading the paltry wound wider.

Iron was bad. Rust was worse. Rust got into your blood.

She shook her head, not to refuse but to convey that she didn't understand, but then couldn’t stop shaking it; it swayed on her neck like the heavy clapper in a bronze bell, falling lower until her chin nearly rested on her chest. It hurt to pull it back upright, as if her brow were attached to the ground by a rope and forced her to haul up the whole weight of the world along with it, and then when she got it upright at last it wanted to loll backwards.

The gestures, the jutting elbow, spoke more than words. She wanted her to come with, go somewhere. Fionn didn’t dare risk shaking her head again. Instead she put up both palms and pushed at the proffered arm—the only time she had voluntarily touched Gloria—with a distasteful curl of her upper lip. From the light force of that push, she propelled herself in a half-circle, starting dazed toward the opening that led back to daylight and the street.

The raven. Send the raven back to Myrken for supplies while she herself got as far away from Razasan and Gloria as she could. Wait in the lowlands for him if she could travel no further. Hope he got back before things spread too far. Patch herself up. She always felt better with a plan.

The roaring in her delicate ears was loud as the sea. She felt she was walking into it, drowning in it.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 28, 2018 2:59 pm

They were pissing away time, here. Poison, a dangerous word, hovered on the horizon. They could struggle over these mountains barriers of communication — but she'd spoken before! — and spend the rest of the afternoon aimlessly flailing and crashing against each other like crumbling walls, but it would fix nothing. Poison, a dangerous word, a black snake sneaking through black grass, looking for unsuspecting ankles. Had this Other Woman been poisoned before they'd passed, she wondered. Was that why she'd burst, like a popped fruit, in the middle of the street?

Nothing here adhered to logic or law. Gloria, while far from a mathematician (numbers sometimes went tricksy on her, sometimes turning upside-down, sometimes switching places on the page), knew formulas established stone-engraved laws for those who followed them—

But in this alley, everything traveled in circles, and the values kept shifting, altering: they could speak, and then they couldn't; the world twisted around her like a tangled ribbon, and then it didn't; the Glass Words poured from the other woman, and then she went dry.

Frustration bubbled in her like a boiling kettle. The Other Woman batted her arm, turned away, head shaking in a wretched, sickly dance. She'd fall apart like paper in a few steps. She'd crumble before she got where she was going. But by the Nameless, she was beyond sense anymore. The heat would swallow her whole, or the proclaimed venom in her blood would burn her brains to ash, or men would converge upon her, or those abyssal eyes would draw knives right from their sheaths, and suffer her damage at the behest of different, different, different

Poison. A dangerous word.

"Forgive this," Gloria said.

Simple problems. Simple answers.

While the Other Woman turned toward the daylight pouring in from the outside of the alley, Gloria raised her lone hand and slashed it out in a fleshy backhand swipe. The strike was neither given great force nor swung with zeal — but if the knuckles landed, they'd find the exposed ear, clap against it, and make the world burst into a thousand pieces of sound and blobs of swimming light. The kind of strike that set nerves aflame and senses blind and ablaze.

Her other arm, wooden-fisted, sought to catch her.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 28, 2018 3:34 pm

Forgive this.

That much she understood, and the moment it clicked in her head, she recognized it as less a plea and more an incipient warning, coupled with the stir of air as Gloria’s arm lifted.

She wheeled back, eyes narrowing and her own forearm coming up to swat away the blow, but she was so tired, every movement like wading through deep sand, and even before she moved she knew she was too late. Rather than sparing the side of her head, she took the backhand right to the upper lip, meat splayed against teeth and a hard bonk to the nose in the bargain. Her upraised arm clutched her face, one elbow bend like a wing. More insult than injury atop of everything else, it hurt just enough to piss her off.

Forgive this, my arse!

With a last burst of anger, she jabbed that elbow with as much force as she could at the hinge of Gloria’s jaw, even as she felt her feet cross and overturn and her legs begin to slide from beneath her.

The swarm of black dots gathered before her eyes and consumed her vision for good.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:38 pm

The elbow was a surprise, a hammerhead that leapt out of nowhere and blasted against the side of Gloria's jaw. It struck true, snapping her head back, to the side, filling her mouth with a warm swath of metallic moisture. The skin scraped across her teeth, her gums, rolled them up under the pressure of bone. The elbow ended its journey by swiping across her nose. Her sinuses filled with hot, backjetted phlegm. Almost choked her.

But her feet, underneath the drape of her volumes of skirts, demanded connection with the cobbles, and never faltered. She gave flesh and blood before she would ever sacrifice her balance.

Her heel shifted, scraped, dared almost to slide away, right from under her.

No.

The Other Woman's body pitched forward, into her, against her, and brought with it all the thousand-stone of limp weight that accompanied a collapsing body.

For once, the alley went silent.

* * * *

—acrid stink of smoke and ash, of hot coal and smoldering wood. The world unfolded in a cross-stitch of light, color, and sense. Feet hammering up, down, up, down, first against uneven stones, then against echoing planks of wood. Reek of wet mahogany in the air, too-old beams sweating out the odors of their histories underneath the pressure of the moist Razasani heat. Sweat, blood, and incense.

A fire crackled and snapped with ferocious purpose. Turned the world bright, flickering, orange. The walls, all a deep, rich green, bent inward and outward in a wild pinwheel of angle and form.

The huffing of breath, blasting in, out, in, out of its host breather and vessel lungs. The burn of acidic breath, and so close, so nearby, the moisture of clothes stuck to skin with the glue of black perspiration.

She fell, fell, fell, until a great, flat expanse was under her, and near her cheek, a pewter candle-holder and its dollops of fallen wax greeted her with their sweet scent.

Voices emerged, lunging at one another through the air over the Other Woman's head.

"You are under firm instruction," barked a man's voice, "not to disturb the Lady's residence without first being summoned. This place is neither fit for rabble, nor for rabble's trash."

"I did not come for the Lady," Gloria said. "I came for you."

"Make any more noise, and you'll disturb her enough to wake her. We have been given exact rules: that on these days, she is to be disturbed for no purpose, and awakened from her slumber for absolutely no cause. Do you truly want to invite that level of ire from her, should she hear the racket you're causing?"

"I have her articles and have settled the day's accounts. I have right to be here, and I require aid. Yours, to be exact."

"I'll tend no fucking urchin, Wynsee." A firm fist knocked down onto the table. "Did the two of you swim in shit?"

Above the Other Woman, candlelight beamed from a rack of tapers suspended from an age-chipped ceiling. Two silhouettes stood over her. Gloria's face, a swollen mass of smeared blood and the shadows of two black eyes, was one of them. "If you can cut pleasure into the Lady's veins, Messa Larrice," the Jerno said, her voice a cacophony of clogged wetness and nasally inflection, "then finding what ails this one shouldn't — shouldn't prove any more challenging. I will pay; I have the means, and will offer it gladly."

Silence. Long. Stretched out to its edges, like a grand, endless plain.

"What do you know of her," Larrice asked. "Why is she in this state?"

"Poison. She says poison."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Wed Aug 29, 2018 6:54 am

Fortunately at the very last instant she remembered there was a secret way out of Razasan if you went down the shoreline instead of by the main road. Now she was free, the wind in her face sweet-sour and hot with feverish decay. The gouging of Tintreach’s hooves in the wet sand jostled her teeth. She leaned forward across his neck in sweet relief, the delicious horse-heat radiating off him in waves and the booming of his vast heartbeat against her cheek. The strand was paved in dead fish dissolving in the summer sun, leaving nothing but their prickly skeletons and a layer of slime like old bacon fat as far as the eye could see. Small wonder no one came this way! Tintreach leaned around the refuse like a dancer, needing no urging from her. Good beast. He wanted to be away from Here as much as she did.

She couldn’t shake the nagging feeling she had left something behind, but that didn’t matter so long as she was out. Whatever it was, it was nothing she couldn’t replace.

She arched her arm for the raven, who landed light as thistledown. Who did you come for, Raven?

I didn’t come for the Lady. I came for you.

Who am I but your lady? she asked, annoyed, but then saw to her horror that its wings bore the High Court colors, green on gold on white. She had sent Glenn the wrong raven. He must be warned. But of course he wouldn’t hear of it, but only grucched, in a peevish, old-man’s bleat, about the racket she was making.

Oh, piss on you then. You quaver like an old nanny goat, smell like it, too. Contemptous, she spat on the toes of his shoes.




(Dumped upon the table, the tall woman coughed softly and clutched at her chest.)



But perhaps he felt bad about the trick he had played her, for he reached behind his back and handed her the satchel. You take this, he told her, his face grim and serious, and I’ll look after the raven.

He started away to answer the knocking at the door.

She rushed ahead, wriggled her way past him in the narrow passage, plastered her back to the wooden panel. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, she hissed. It’s Her raven. She knows where you are. You mustn’t let Her in.

But he wouldn’t listen, he never listened. He turned away to squabble with some woman she did not know, while the wood grew blistering hot against her back, burning a hole into her shoulderblade. The pernicious heat seeped into her upper arm. Voices boomed outside. Acrid smoke seeped through the cracks, and they both began to cough.

They’ve set the house on fire! she shouted, pushing at him. You have to go!




(As Gloria and the physician argued who had the right to be here, both tangled in a war for authority, the woman on the table gave a thick moan and slurred out, “Tá an teach ar theine” through chattering teeth before her chest and shoulders convulsed. Blue-tinged saliva shot from her mouth, dribbled from the corner of her lips. In the stifling, airless room, her whole body trembled violently with cold.)



Then somehow she was not leaning against the door but lying atop it.



Her eyes snapped open.

A lighted taper, honey-sweet and warm with scent, huge as an oak so close to her face, dazzled her with its brilliance. The deeper darkness of her pupils shrank to pinholes, and the room fell into place around her: a ceiling so high she was instantly alarmed lest it should collapse on her, a suffocating sweetness in the air undercut with a fusty, prickly scent she barely recognized but associated with grain sacks and the dust packed into their fibers. Too dark for daylight yet alive and squirming with light. The echoes gave her a sense of the shape and size of the space around her: big but empty, enclosed.

Two dark thunderheads resolved themselves into faces. Gloria, framed by her bonnet, her features somehow even more protuberant and dour from below, and a grey gaunt man who seized her heart with terror on first sight. Something of him smelled like iron, the sour tang of iron, as well as a sharp astringent reek she half-recognized but associated, inexplicably, with her mother. Biotáillí bán, the stinging white spirits her mother used to clean out wounds.

Where she was mattered not, only that it was not where she wished to be.

Simple enough to solve: leave.

In a single savage impulse, she snatched the pewter holder, rolled onto her injured shoulder, and thrust the flame like a dagger toward Larrice’s groin.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Wed Aug 29, 2018 2:53 pm

"There are a hundred-thousand different poisons synthesized from an even greater number of plants and powders, Wynsee. Treat one of them, you accelerate a thousand others."

"She vomited," Gloria said. "Profusely." As if that would narrow down the possibilities.

"How keen an observation."

"Look upon her shoulder, then. Tell me true if it's where the poison was delivered."

(But that would confuse the timeline, wouldn't it; that would tangle the facts. Did she truly fall ill from the poison, then? It would explain the flight and fall, that her beating heart had cast the poison more vigorously through her. But what of the shoulder, of its starburst of visible damage and discontent? And what of the way the Black Oil surged and dragged Gloria toward her, and the little seed-like dollop in those palms—)

A cry of both surprise and pain startled Gloria from her lapse of thought. The Other Woman sprang into motion, her slurring words and rolling head becoming a sudden blur of action and violence. Larrice snarled out an incomprehensible string of shouts and curses and patted profusely at the black-burnt groin of his loose trouers, There had certainly been force behind the thrust — enough to double him over with pain — but the threat of smoldering wool was a greater concern. He stumbled back, struck a tiny table where a stoneware wash-basin lingered. It teetered, tilted, slipped to the edge of the table, splashed water over its lip...

It fell the floor, struck its side, bounced once, and then collapsed into a thousand tiny pieces across the lacquered floorboards.

Gloria grabbed desperately at the pewter candle-horn, and hissed "Stop, stop," like—

like a governess taming unruly children, she thought.

She thrust her face over the Other Woman's, not close enough to beg for a forehead to the nose, but near enough to be the panicking creature's sole vision. Hers was neither a beautiful nor comely face — it was too flat, too pockmarked by sand-scars and blemishes for most men to deem serviceable — but it was at least the only familiar anchor this Other Woman possessed after waking up in this altogether new surrounding. This time, she relinquished force, but instead dared a touch to the forehead, and trying to lock eyes with the frightful blankness of the dark ones set inside that alien face. "Trying," she gasped, "to help. To help. Help."

Simplicity, Gloria. Even intelligent creatures respond like beaten animals.

"Trying to help, Rabbit," she said again, a trill of noise under her breath, a hum of comfort like one might use to soothe a child.

But Gloria knew. Knew it was growing futile, these efforts to contain a confused and mad being. Knew words and motions could only go so far, until she drove the offended Woman to bite, rip, save herself, survive. Worry flooded her in the form of a tight, pressurized stone in the middle of her gut. I want to know. I need to know how she knows him. I need to understand—

"Tell me," she whispered, "here. In here. If — if you can."

Gloria jammed a fat index finger against her temple.

"Tell me how to fix you."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:41 pm

Whatsoever their age, rank, or dignity, all men moved at the same speed when their stones were stake. Larrice was no exception and whether or not the fire took hold of his clothes, she got exactly what she was after: he stumbled from the table’s edge, opening a free path. She was on the verge of rolling for it when Gloria grabbed for her candlestick. As if this were some sort of bizarre purse-snatching, she struggled with grim, stony determination to hang onto the nearest thing she had to a weapon, until she realized she was wasting her reserves on the most ridiculous game of tug-of-war she’d ever played and abruptly relinquished it.

Gloria bent close to her, far too close, pinning her down with the sheer weight of her shadow. A rough chapped hand loomed over her face. The best she could do was close her eyes and turn her head aside. “Don’t,” she choked out. “Don’t.”

But the brush of fingers on her brow was surprisingly gentle and blessedly cool against the heat radiating from her forehead. She didn’t dare relax—sometimes the caress came before the blow—but her eyes opened. Up close, the eyes revealed themselves not as solid darkness, but deep liquid brown in which an overlarge black pupil floated, with a fingernail-paring of white on their innermost rim. For the first time she looked directly into Gloria’s face and seemed to see another person, another woman. Something that could be spoken to.

“Why?” Her voice was a strained whisper. “Why is tha brought me here? Be nae help.

She touched her own two fingers to her temple simply to acknowledge the gesture, then shook her head to show she didn’t understand it. Tell her in here? Where else was there to go? Why hadn’t she just asked her outside?

Tell me how to fix you.

It was a sacrifice admitting even so little, but she had to give away something or this would go round and round until she passed out again and the gods alone knew what would happen then. That old wretch stank of iron. Tultharian bled you if you fainted. He might try to cut her. “No fix, not here. Be iron-poison. Tá sé uafásach fuar, ní féidir liom—

Another coughing spell gripped her by the throat. If she let it consume her, she wouldn’t be able to stop. Her cheeks bulged with air, her stomach silently shook, but she swallowed down the worst of it.

In a wretched toad-croak, she went on. “I…have…megasheen. Med-a-shin.” Please let her have gotten the damn word out correctly. “Not here. Far off. Must get soon, one day, two days. Else—”

One finger traced a path from her shoulder down the length of her right arm, then mimed violently dashing the arm to the floor, a soft plosive sound between her teeth imitating the bowl smashing to pieces. The finger pointed again to her shoulder, insistently tapping to draw Gloria’s eye to the spot before it traced another line down to the middle of her chest and drew two circles around her breastbone, over her heart. She clenched her fist and made a deliberately theatrical grimace.

Her eyes popped open again, frantic, furious, willing her to understand. Dash it all, Gloria, you must understand that part. I know you understand it, you that flashed the iron in my face. You know, damn you.

Her weary head dropped upon the pillow of her own dense curls. She had to save enough strength to get to the horse. She was wasting it in struggling. Gloria was being decent and would be decent, and she would decent her to death trying to pry the truth out of her. Those starved bone-grey eyes with their pinprick specks bore into her, sucking the juice out of her. She could actually feel her wanting, and there was never a Tuatha in the world who couldn't turn that need back if it suited them. There was the knife and there was the rib and there the ridge through which she could jam the blade home.

Her mouth twisted and trembled. “Must go. Please. Must go.”

Staring Gloria down, she cupped a hand over the swell of her breast. Folded her arms before her and swung them gently, like a rocking cradle. Touched her own stomach tenderly.

It was a cheap, cruel weapon but you didn't begrudge a blade its cheapness if it still cut.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 30, 2018 3:07 pm

Iron-poison.

Realization became a flash of lightning in Gloria's pale eyes.

It did not constitute every answer, but it was an answer, and the flat-faced girl's face bled all its color away. Her gaze flicked across the map of the Other Woman's features as if seeking out some X to designate a victorious location, some hint at truth. Iron-poisoning. A foreign idea, and wholly inhuman — but far from unfamiliar. Sinews in her neck tightened to stone. Her head snapped sideways, struck maliciously by an old memory. Not visions, not the lightning-flash mental theatre that often cast itself before her eyes when her heart skipped a beat. Instead, phantoms in her senses—

Broken shard of glass gripped for life in her hand, clutched so fitfully that her skin split open like a mouth and folded in a bloody smile around it. Shriek of glass-edge scraping up the butt of an iron cookpot, rattling, crackling, staining brown rust along the broken mirror-blade. Stabbing. Thunk of arms, shock of impact in the elbows. Stabbing until it—

Suddenly, Gloria knew.

"Larrice, what in the gods' names is happening out..." A voice from across the room — a woman's — had been drowned in a million years' of sleep. A chamber door, one leading further into the home, blasted open behind them. A figure in a wrinkled gown stood with her arms stretched between the jambs, the forearms criss-crossed in moist strips of cloth.

But Gloria did not notice, did not even raise her head to acknowledge this new entrant's demand. Because from the frightened brown eyes and down, across the chest, toward the hillock of a belly heaving up, down, up, down on the table, she traced a slow-moving pattern of pantomime and information that composed an invisible narrative in burning letters in the back of her mind.

A mother. Soon-to-be. One day, two people—

But for now, two hearts. And should that crawling iron smother the first...

Med-a-shin. Far off.

"Up," Gloria gasped, and snared the Other Woman by the dress-collar. But her clumsy fingers only flicked at a sliver of fabric before, as if a hook had been lodged into her belly and wrenched violently backward, Gloria shot back and away from the Other Woman in a flurry of skirts and arms. A pale, fragile forearm snaked across the crease of her neck, dragged her back. Larrice's sweaty, pallid face flashed briefly over the seamstress' broad shoulder. Gloria gave out a belching gasp of surprise as the surgeon squeezed across Gloria's throat with the bend of his inner elbow.

"Apologies for the noise, Aremeda, but your dog," he bellowed, "brought some beggar in the door with her — an uninvited guest that has no place in our quarters. And under the pretense of aiding it, no less."

The woman named Aremeda, in her stillness, supported almost entirely by the warped doorframe, leered at the figure on the table. "What is it," she asked.

"Something soon dead," Larrice said. "She tried to pike me, she did, with a fucking candle-holder."

"Did she succeed?"

"Nearly."

"Poor Larrice," she said. "Will your fragile selfdom ever recover?"

Thin wisps of breath sucked in through the woman's nostrils, and then petered out through the canal between her dry lips. She moved like a thing half-living, her balance ever-compromised, and slithered into the room with a sidewinder's gait, her feet scraping and slipping along the floor in a stride that had grown used to their owner's altered state. The dark hair came loose, and from it, she withdrew a ribbon of violet silk that she wrapped around her knuckles and stretched, nearly until it snapped, between her fists.

She drifted toward the woman on the table. Over her shoulder she barked, "Oster! Tibalt!"

Her smell would be the first to reach the Other Woman: a dull perfume of dried blood and charred flowers, of wine-acid and saltpeter. Gaunt, hollow, and closer to the peak of human age where life was a granted commodity instead of an expectation, Aremeda Follox lingered just out of arms' reach, hovering on the tips of her toes like a wraith.

"Greetings," she said.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 30, 2018 4:06 pm

The realization in those bone-colored eyes told her that the knife had pierced the rib.

She smothered a smile, but thought in satisfaction, Good.

Barely a second to savor it when the peace of the room shattered. The grey man dragged Gloria away by the neck—good!—and she took the opportunity to wriggle herself upright, suddenly far less exhausted than she had been before, black eyes glittering as they probed the room’s walls for a door, any door. They landed on one at the very moment it opened to admit Follox.

For a moment, Fionn doubted what she was even looking at. The woman seem less to have entered than to have been summoned. A creature tall and brittle as a baobhan sidh, with the same ghastly pallor and the same unfathomable hunger drawn in the lines of its gaunt cheeks and its straw-like, gauze-wrapped arms.

This woman’s closer to death than I. She’s a corpse staggering around for a hole.

Suddenly she could scarcely breathe for the choking sweet putrescence, worse even than the confinement of the carriage: garden full of rotting marigolds, perfume spilled in a sepulcher, piss and blood. This time she retched from the stomach instead of the diaphragm and felt almost relieved to do it. Nothing came up but a thin, milky gruel and she turned her head to spit.

The door seemed a wavering mirage, an impossible distance to traverse. The tall woman may as well been the horizon itself for all the good it would do to try to get around her.

But behind her…behind her the grey man was occupied with Gloria. She’d no doubt that if Gloria ever got her dumb-ox head free, he’d be even more occupied with her. He didn’t dare let her go. Gloria might make a grab in passing…but Gloria, too, probably had more on her mind just now.

And on the long wall of the chamber, the side opposite the cold hearth, four sets of drawn, dusty velvet curtains hung nearly floor to ceiling like a line of giant, brooding attendants with mouths sealed silent. Curtains meant windows. Windows meant glass. Glass broke.

There. Now she had a plan.

Her face smoothed, became as guileless and stupid as a gut-shot deer, as the woman, the creature, paused before her, leering down on her coiled form as if she were a chicken plucked and in the pot. It seemed impossible that that salted-leather mouth could stretch to speak.

Greetings.

That word, at least, was impossible to misinterpret. Cautiously, her eyes not on the woman’s death-mask face but on that sinister stretch of ribbon between her fists, she managed to raise her numb right hand to her breastbone and bowed her head over it in the formal Court greeting. She held the pose for the barest fraction of politeness, then twisted in place. The good left arm swiftly pointed behind her, leveling a long black-tipped finger at the woman struggling against Larrice’s arm. “That one,” she said firmly and without hesitation, “stole me.”
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