Memories of the gun caused him to look down at his chest, searching for any sign of injury and finding nothing. He couldn’t even see a tear in his shirt, but there was a faint ache from a spot just above his sternum, not truly painful but present enough to signify a livid bruise. Whatever she had shot him with, it hadn’t been a bullet.
He saw that she still held the gun, though now it was lowered to her side and he took some comfort from the fact that her finger wasn’t on the trigger. Seeing it clearly, Clay wasn’t sure “gun” was the right term. It seemed to be made of a combination of brass and steel, with a pistol-like grip that confirmed it as some kind of weapon. But it lacked a cylinder, and the barrel was too short and narrow for anything but the puniest projectile. There was a finery to the weapon’s construction that was beyond Clay’s experience, so many different components formed into a single device. He knew he was looking at something beyond the skill or knowledge of any gunsmith or artificer in the world above.
He tore his gaze from the weapon, heart leaping with relief when he saw Loriabeth and Sigoral still lying on the dais. Unlike him, his cousin and the marine remained unconscious. Also, his captor hadn’t felt the need to tie either of them to a pillar.
He jerked as the woman spoke again, eyes snapping to meet hers. She had lowered herself into a crouch and regarded him with a level of scrutiny that bordered on the openly hostile. Their packs lay open near by, the contents disordered due to a thorough rummaging. Glancing at his bonds once more, Clay realised he was bound with the length of rope he had carried across the ice, and couldn’t help voicing a rueful groan.
The woman spoke again, more insistently this time. Clay found the words meaningless, the cadence and prolonged vowels were all completely unfamiliar.
“Sorry, lady,” he said, shaking his head. “Just Mandinorian, though I can just about get by bargaining in Dalcian.”
The woman stared at him for a moment in obvious incomprehension then gave a deep sigh of frustration as she lowered her gaze and smoothed a trembling hand over her forehead. After a moment she calmed herself with a visible effort, breathing deeply and draining any emotion from her features. Clay estimated her to be scarcely older than he, though the flawlessness of her skin may have made her appear younger. Her hair was cut short, only a half inch or so from the scalp, and he saw no jewellery or other accoutrements on her person.
She turned to the packs and extracted Clay’s canteen, the one half-full of diluted Green. She lifted the canteen, touching the cap to her lips as she mimed taking a drink, raising her eyebrows in an unmistakable question. You drink this. Yes?
Clay’s gaze lingered on the canteen before tracking back to the woman, her expression now one of expectant surety. “Guess you know that ain’t just water,” he said.
The woman frowned and shook the canteen at him, making the contents slosh about as she asked a question in her unfathomable tongue. Clay stared back, saying nothing, unwilling to reveal so much to so strange a captor. He maintained his silence and they matched stares, her frown deepening into outright anger. She spoke again, voice raised as she moved towards the dais, stepping into the crystal’s glow with pause. She halted at Loriabeth’s side, raising the brass-and-steel gun to point it at his cousin’s chest before turning back to Clay, a question and a threat evident in her gaze.
Clay strained against the straps, unable to contain his shout. “Leave her alone!” His anger provoked a small flinch in the woman’s bearing but she didn’t move, instead carefully placing her finger on the gun’s trigger.
“Alright!” he shouted, nodding rapidly and hoping she understood the gesture. “I can drink the damn stuff.”
The woman betrayed a small shudder of relief as she lowered the gun and returned to crouch at his side, reaching into his pack and extracting Scriberson’s note-book. She leafed through it briefly, stopping at a particular page then crouching at Clay’s side once more, holding it open. He recognised the page as an annotated sketch of Brionar, the ringed planet the astronomer had shown him through the telescope at the base of the falls. The woman tapped the sketch then made a scribbling gesture before pointing at Clay. Did you do this?
He shook his head. “No. That’s the work of a dead man.”
She grimaced in consternation, leafing through more pages until she showed him a table of some kind, rows of numbers set out in Scriberson’s messy script below a much more neatly drawn diagram. It looked like one of the constellations to Clay, but his knowledge of Scriberson’s work was meagre at best. The woman’s finger moved over the page, tapping in certain places. It seemed she was particularly interested in the diagram and one set of numbers at the bottom of the table.
“Sorry, lady, I ain’t never been no scholar,” Clay said, shrugging as much as the ropes would allow him.
She seemed about to question him further but stopped when the chamber shuddered. A faint rumbling filled the space and the light cast by the crystal flickered as the shaking continued. Clay saw the woman tense as a thin stream of dust cascaded down from the shadowed ceiling. The tremor continued for about thirty seconds, after which the woman turned back to Clay, her face now set in a frown of hard determination.
He managed not to flinch as she leaned closer and stared into his eyes. He fought down an instinctive impulse to struggle against his bonds as her gaze lingered, unnerving in its intensity but also commanding, capturing his attention so completely he felt his fear fading away. Eventually she blinked and broke the stare, Clay’s heart giving an involuntary leap as she hefted the brass-and-steel gun.
Her thumb depressed a small lever on the side of the chamber which duly sprang open with a kind of neat, mechanical efficiency that would have made any gunsmith envious. Clay let out a faint groan of self-reproach at seeing the chamber was empty. She was never gonna shoot Lori, he realised as the woman’s free hand moved to the belt on her waist, opening one of the pockets to retrieve a small glass vial.
She held it up before his eyes, turning it so it caught the light. Clay was sufficiently familiar with the various shades of product by now to recognise the viscous liquid it contained. “Blue?” he said.
The woman slotted the vial into the gun and closed the chamber, muttering something before pressing the barrel to her forearm and pulling the trigger. There was a low hiss of escaping air, then she removed the gun from her arm, leaving behind a faint red welt.
“Oh,” Clay said as she pressed the gun’s barrel to his arm and pulled the trigger. “You too, huh?”
? ? ?
The trance closed in immediately, Clay finding himself on Nelphia’s surface with the woman a few feet away. There was no sign of her own mindscape, which meant she either didn’t have one or was skilled enough to keep it completely suppressed. She stood staring all around in patent awe, as if not quite capable of grasping what she saw.