It was fully dark, but there were birds singing. It would be dawn in two hours, with smoke over Pittsburgh. There was nothing else to do, and no one else to do it. Elián was chained up, again. Xie was covered in blood. The Abbot was dying. And Grego was dead. It had to be me.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”
The Cumberlanders took me into the miseri, then through the narrow door behind the Abbot’s desk. The hallway there was lined with compartments, like the cubbies of a catacomb, and in each of them one of our teachers was stored, hands folded, head tucked tight in sleep. There should have been power-points pulsing in the walls behind them, recharging them—but there were not. There was only one light, a handheld lantern set on top of a pile of sandbags. There were soldiers there, halfway down the empty, echoing hall. They had set up a checkpoint, complete with some minor fortifications and a gun in a fixed position, pointing down the hall, to the simple closed door of the Abbot’s cell.
Talis was behind that door.
I did not think all the sandbags in the world would do the Cumberlanders any good. But it’s odd, what makes soldiers feel better.
We came into the pool of light. “General says to take her to see him,” the woman guarding me said to the checkpoint soldiers. She cocked her head at the Abbot’s door, in case anyone was in doubt about who or what earned that heavy pronoun. Talis.
“I wish to go alone,” I added.
The boy at the sandbags—I recognized him, with a jolt, as the lad who’d turned so green at the thought of me being tortured—looked at me with widened eyes, and it was a moment before he scared up any bravado. “Better you than me, Princess,” he said.
He reminded me of Grego. I hoped Talis wouldn’t kill him.
The soldier in charge of the checkpoints frowned at the other two—then nodded.
They let me pass.
I left the guard and the lamplight behind; my armless, swaying shadow went ahead of me. I paused before the door and let its eye sweep me: once, twice. What intelligence controlled that eye now? The door opened.
Inside was only darkness.
“Talis?” I called softly, as if into a lion’s den.
For a moment there was silence, then a rustle, a glint of eyes. Then someone standing before me—the Swan Rider girl in a sepia-dirty white shirt, faded jeans. I could still smell the horse on her. But the moment the thing spoke, the Rider was gone. She had become Talis again, a godling in the doorway, with hair all mussed. “Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” he said, with a long slow smile. “Do come in.”
I shivered. But I went in. The door slid closed behind me.
The Abbot’s cell was utterly empty. Two hundred years old, and his cell was empty. Four walls. No windows. A blank, hard ceiling that was like a weight over me.
Someone—Talis himself, I supposed—had dragged in a memory cushion. His duster lay on the floor beside it, kicked off like a . . . blanket? Did such a creature sleep?
The AI leaned backward against the wall and tucked up one foot like a heron. “What brings you here, Greta? And at such a strange hour.”
The foot resting against the stone wall was bare. A woman’s foot, slender and high-arched, the nails neatly trimmed. I stared at it.
“Talis,” I said. “I want you to kill me.”
23
CONSENT
Talis blinked.
I had made the strategic mind of the epoch blink.
“I’m certainly willing to kill you,” he said. “But you do understand, I have no particular expertise in hands-on murder.” He flashed a dazzling smile and spread said hands—they were elegantly long-fingered, striped with rein-callus, and not his at all. “Could get messy.”
“No—I mean—”
Talis clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Just a tick.” He stooped and rifled through the pockets of the discarded coat. I hoped he wasn’t looking for a weapon. I hadn’t yet had the chance to explain my request for death, and I would have hated to disappoint him by asking for a delay. But he stood up flourishing his glasses. “Rachel’s farsighted,” he explained, unfolding them and settling them on his nose. “And a bit night-blind—she never said. Doesn’t know, maybe. Not everybody knows their own weaknesses. One just assumes one’s normal.”
“Were you asleep?” I surprised myself by genuinely wanting to know.
“On and off,” he said absently. “Rachel dreams . . .” He leaned past me, triggering the door, and stuck his head into the hallway. That provoked a wave of raised weapons, the click of safeties echoing down the stone corridor. “Are those sandbags? Ha!” He popped back into the room. The door closed. “Sandbags!” he told me. “I love that. What exactly do you think they think I’m going to do?”
“Uh—” I said, unable for a moment to keep up with him. He moved fast, and I was so tired that my bones were hollow.
“So,” Talis said. “Death.” He plopped down onto the edge of the cushion and patted the space beside him. “Sit down before you fall over, Greta. And explain to me your brilliant plan.”