Eighteen
Isabelle clawed her way through a fog of pain and fever. Where am I? Her bones felt like hot coals cooking her flesh and blistering her skin. Was this how a cut of beef felt on the spit, roasting in its own juices? If there was any part of her that did not ache, she could not name it. The vaporization point of self equals the limit of suffering as it approaches agony. Call it Isabelle’s first theorem of pain. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel worse than she did after her father set his bloodshadow on her.
It was humbling to know she had been wrong.
The last thing she remembered was the stinging bite of the vapor filling her nose and her lungs. And then a darkness full of sharp-edged, rasping dreams, and screams, and now—
The creak of heavy ropes under tension reached her awareness, and not all of the heaving and dipping in her gut was a product of her uneasy flesh. She really was being tossed slowly up and down.
Skyship, she surmised, and the implications of that were enough to force her upward, outward through the haze of sickness. Kantelvar. The artifex had kidnapped her and now they had left San Augustus, left the Craton Massif. She was en route to whatever stable he meant to breed her in.
She opened her eyes—they felt glued shut and only opened partway—and found herself in a ship’s cabin. Thick-glassed portholes let in a thin, watery light, but even that poor illumination stung her brain like a thousand tiny needles. She was bundled in blankets and tied into a hammock that was wrapped around her like a sausage skin.
Cold air scraped at her face, chilling her fever sweat, and her breath steamed. Where had this winter come from? But she knew the answer to that if only the pudding of her brain would set up properly. Altitude. A few thousand extra meters of elevation turned summer to winter. A few thousand more made men delirious right before it turned them into frozen corpses. Kantelvar was insane in the lower sky. How much worse would the upper airs make him?
Isabelle tried to shrug her way out of the blankets. If she could just get her hand free, she could undo these ties, which looked as if they’d been put into place to keep her from thrashing in her fever.
A sharp pain knifed up her right arm when she tried to press out with her elbow. She grabbed her right arm with her left.
She grabbed a stump.
A stump!
Horror flooded her veins as her left hand crawled, spiderlike, over the place where her right arm should have been, seeking something that wasn’t there and finding a metal stub instead. Kantelvar had removed her arm at the shoulder. Saints in Paradise, he’d dismembered her. Disbelief and denial flooded Isabelle’s mind. Her gorge rose in pure visceral terror, and she only barely managed to roll herself far enough to vomit over the side of her cocoon. The convulsions seemed to go on forever, even long after she’d run out of bile to disgorge.
One good thing about the retching was that, by the time she was done, she was too spent for panic. No wonder she ached with fever. Amputation was surely one of the greatest insults a body could endure.
Why did he disarm me? Kantelvar might have been completely mad, but he never did anything without a reason. If he’d wanted to cripple or contain her, he would have taken her good hand. Why take the abnormal hand?
Understanding struck her nearly breathless. He’d cut off her identifying mark, and she could think of only two reasons for that. Either he wanted to conceal her identity—from whom?—or he wanted to convince someone else that she was dead. She imagined her absolutely identifiable bloody stump dropped somewhere near her chambers. Her countrymen would cry murder, and Grand Leon would demand justice, but Carlemmo would die, and the Aragothic court would fracture and begin fighting amongst themselves. The mercenaries from Oberholz and Vecci would pick sides and draw their home powers into the fray, and Brathon would take the opportunity to challenge Aragoth’s overskies influence. All the powers of the world would descend on Aragoth like wolves on a wounded bear. Blood would run in rivers. Kantelvar would have his age of ruin, and she … did he honestly expect her to comply with his wish that she bear some unfortunate child that he could twist into a counterfeit Savior?
Surely he must realize she would oppose him at every step, and just as surely he had accounted for her resistance, just as he had accounted for everything else. He had been planning this for more than a thousand years. He had to have contingency plans for every conceivable opposition, which meant that to thwart him, she had to do something inconceivable.
She certainly couldn’t do anything while she was hanging here like a smoked ham. The straps around the hammock clearly hadn’t been arranged to prevent escape, or they would not have been placed so that she could, after a short eternity of squirming, shrugging, and sweating, get hold of the first buckle with her teeth. She worried the leather and brass like an exhausted terrier. Her neck strained, and her jaw ached, and her stump burned with fresh agony every time it hung up in the folds of the blankets, but she did not relent. Tears and drool and sweat were streaming down her face by the time she worked the first buckle free.
One down, four to go.
Ah, but now she worked her good arm loose, unlatched the next buckle, and peeled off the blanket to see what had become of her starboard limb.
The arm had been cut off just below the shoulder. The stump had been covered with a cap of quondam metal, a gleaming hemisphere that swirled with shades of pink and purple and glittered with motes of firefly light. There was no obvious seam where metal ended and flesh began; the one flowed smoothly into the other like twilight into full darkness. It was so strange and unexpected, she even forgot her horror in the fascination of it. She ran her fingers over the metal and found it smooth and warm and sensate. How could that be?
The fever heat that had filled her awareness slowly ebbed, as if her waking allowed a pent-up reservoir of pain to drain away.
She finished unbuckling the straps; not as easy as it should have been without her right wrist to use as a brace. She might not have used her crippled hand for much, but she used her right arm all the time.