“You tried to kill the Savior! You would have doomed the world to an eternity of chaos.” He sparked her again, and she convulsed, banging her head on the floor and her arm on the table leg. Her shoulder nearly wrenched from its socket.
“S … stop. P … please … m-mercy…” She had to make him start thinking again. Thinking took time. She had to delay him until … what? There was no legion of musketeers to come riding over the hill. She could not best Kantelvar with force, he was impervious to reason, and he knew more about guile than anyone alive or dead.
“You dare to beg?” Kantelvar shrieked. “After everything I have done for you?”
Kantelvar raised his staff again, but Julio, facedown on the table, made a muffled shout. “And you, oh spider, are about to kill the Savior’s mother!”
Kantelvar paused, arrested in the middle of a bestial snarl. He rounded on Julio, the cable on the back of his head whipping like a sheet in a gale. “Silence, you thrice-over traitor.”
“Madman!” Julio said. “You very nearly killed your own broodmare.”
Isabelle got her legs under her. It felt like worms of lightning were burrowing through her flesh. Kantelvar had clearly misinterpreted her actions in the cell as an attempt on Julio’s life rather than an attempted rescue. To him, life was a never-ending cycle of betrayal and revenge in which he was both orchestrator and victim.
“Julio tried to kill me,” she improvised. “He tried to burn my ship out from under me. I hated him for that. I could not stand the thought of being his wife, with his body close to mine, his flesh inside me.”
Kantelvar returned his attention to her, a thin, translucent mask of control stretched across his burning madness. “But only his seed can sire the Savior.”
Reason had no hold on him, but his vision sank its hooks to the bone, this dramatic revenge he had plotted on the world. Give him Céleste!
Once again she invoked her Saintstongue: “It is not the seed that makes the Savior. It is the soul! Your soul, my love. That is what I have waited for all these centuries, and that is why you brought me back.”
Kantelvar’s expression went slack with shock and wonder.
Is this what you’ve been hoping for all this time? A great woman’s affection? Poor, poor man. Isabelle smiled beatifically at him and spread her arms. “Come, my valiant champion. Receive your triumph.”
Kantelvar’s human puppet stumbled toward her. Even the spidery machine leaned in. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, he had to know he was being beguiled, but the part of him that wanted was ascendant over the part of him that thought. He croaked something in the Saintstongue too thickly accented for her to make out anything except, “… reflection times.” No, make that, “memory of … through the ages.” Builder’s breath; who ever thought the fate of the world would rest on her ability to conjugate in a dead language?
“It was your memory and your love that kept me alive,” she said. How long would this trance hold? She had to pull him close. It was like trying to reel in a leviathan with a length of sewing thread.
A piteous rage filled Kantelvar’s voice. “You required excessive diligence.”
I made him wait too long. He didn’t just want Céleste’s attention, he wanted to be worshipped as he had worshipped her. She bowed her head and did her best curtsy on wobbly legs. “I am sorry, my champion. I was weak and fearful, but you have remade the world for me. I am forever in your debt.”
Her legs gave out, but she made sure to land in an artful heap at his feet. “Can you ever forgive me, my lord, my love?” Now, if only he would bid her rise … if only she had the strength.
While she was staring at her distorted reflection in Kantelvar’s polished boots, he brought the spiny tip of his staff down so close to the back of her head that the proximity of the sparks made her neck hairs stand on end. His body’s breathing was deep and hoarse, as if he were trying to draw air down a well of a thousand years. Should she kiss his boots? Perhaps later she would feel some humiliation in this prostration, if she was lucky enough to have a later, but for now, it was only a means to a chance, submission as a means of control.
Finally he stroked her hair. A purely physical shudder ran down her spine. Could he tell the difference between a quiver of revulsion and one of desire? Then he knelt before her and gently lifted her chin until they were nose to patchwork nose. His cheek glistened with tears, but his sapphire eye burned. “I forgive you.” He leaned forward, and Isabelle, realizing what he wanted, gave it to him. His lips had been sewn into a rigid circle around his speaking tube, which jutted forward like a brass tongue. She kissed the obscene protrusion. The grille was rough on her tongue, and the abused flesh around it hot and rancid with leaking serum. His arms encircled her ribs and he lifted her easily to her feet.
Even as her mouth accepted his grotesque intrusion, she raised her spark-hand and drove it through his skull. Her phantom flesh passed harmlessly through living skin, bone, and brain, but not the wire filaments permeating his gray matter or the solid metal tube of his oculus. The metal bit against her ethereal flesh. The shock of it jerked Kantelvar back. The sharp edge of his mouth tube took a strip of skin from her lip. His ordinary eye went wide, the pupil gaping, a dark fathomless window into the abyss. His arms fell nerveless to his sides and the spiny-ended staff fell away. She grabbed the ocular tube and gave a great yank, back and forth, like shaking a hen’s egg and scrambling the chick inside.
The host’s corpse crumpled at her feet. For a moment, she could do nothing but stare, eyes wide and mind stunned, as all the terror she’d been suppressing flooded through her. Her knees wanted to buckle. Her gut wanted to heave.
The umbilical tentacle shivered and then yanked back hard, ripping itself out of the back of the host’s head in a spray of brain and bone.
The spider-thing whipped its other tentacles at her. She lurched out of the way. The tentacles gouged great grooves in the stone wall.
“Let me up!” Julio shrieked, his voice brittle with panic. A half-dozen straps held him down. Kantelvar’s spider positioned an auger-tipped appendage over the back of Julio’s skull. The tool spun with a whine like a giant hornet.
Another tentacle lashed at Isabelle. She gave ground. Razor-tipped appendages sliced air a centimeter from her nose. Kantelvar couldn’t stretch any farther without abandoning Julio. It made a surgical incision in the skin on the back of his skull.
At the other end of the room the warder waited. Isabelle dove for the staff on the floor and prayed that it was the talisman by which his machines recognized their master.
Pain exploded in her thigh. Blood sprayed as a whirring blade opened a long gash in her leg.