Mercurial Page 5

  The Destroyer allowed the flame to grow until it was a bonfire in miniature, hissing and snarling like a wild animal in her palm. “What exactly is Tal to you?”

  Nyx couldn’t help baring her teeth. “What is he to you? Just another guard dog, just another toy for you to break and discard? How dare you call him yours? No person can own another, and you are nowhere near worthy of him in any case.”

  The Destroyer’s expression cracked then, straining along fault lines, allowing an incandescent fury to shine through from beneath. Nyx saw it and flinched.

  The Destroyer steadied herself. The fury vanished. “He sought me out and pledged his service of his own will,” she said coolly. “I haven’t made him do anything he did not freely swear to do, and I have certainly not broken him.”

  “He has new scars,” Nyx countered. Anger lashed through her at the memory of the white lines creeping over Tal’s shoulder and curling around his collar bone. Had she had him beaten? Did she torture him too, in her free time?

  The Destroyer’s shoulders drew back and she lifted her chin. “I do not torture people without a purpose, and I have never put him to the question. I don’t have to. He is loyal. He is mine. His scars are from my would-be assassins and from accidents, nothing more.”

  “Accidents that wouldn’t happen if he guarded anyone but you,” Nyx said, but she relaxed incrementally. This was something she’d had nightmares about, what the Destroyer might do to Tal when he was under her power. But if she was telling the truth—and the Destroyer seemed raw enough right now that Nyx believed her, at least on this—then Tal suffered only because he killed for her, and not because she actively tormented him. Not that that was truly better. Tal’s soul had always been so much more fragile than his body, and Nyx feared what his work must be doing to him.

  “You’ve not answered my question yet,” the Destroyer said, her tone darkening. “I will ask it once more, and not again—”

  “Do you promise?” Nyx interrupted.

  The Destroyer ignored her. “How do you know Tal? You will answer me, or regret the consequences.”

  From a few cells away, a strangled cry broke out. “Just—just do it,” a woman’s voice sobbed hoarsely. “You must do it. Make her stop.”

  Up until now, the townsfolk in the car had kept silent, nothing but clumps of huddled, horror-tense bodies in the shadows of their cells, hiding like mice from a serpent. But apparently they couldn’t bear their fear any longer; the woman’s words whipped through the prisoners like an icy wind, leaving them shuddering and moaning.

  Nyx took them in—the whites of their eyes gleaming, the stench of burnt clothing and skin, the bitter, flaky taste of ash that lingered even here. The hatred at her core grew a few more layers, and she used them to strengthen herself for what was to come.

  She turned back to the Destroyer. “Torture me all you want,” she said, and the words within her burned like the fire before her. “I have said all I care to say.”

  The Destroyer’s expression grew cruel. She stepped forward, and the flame in her palm coiled into itself like a spring, tension winding through every spark and flicker as the color changed from dull orange to white-hot.

  The Destroyer held out her hand. And then the pain began.

  he day before, Nyx had been drinking her daily dose of poison when her mother burst into the Saints outpost.

  “We have the location,” the older woman announced. Her voice was triumphant. Cold. So were her eyes, and they only warmed a little when they landed on the vial in Nyx’s hand.

  Nyx swallowed, licking the last traces of bitter liquid from her lips. The concoction always tasted like blood. Which was fitting, she supposed. “Where?” she demanded. “Will we have enough time to reach it?”

  Time was always their enemy, almost as much as the metallurgy class was. Twice before in the last six months had the Saints been tipped off to the location of a town the Destroyer was set to punish, only to fail because it was too far from any of their hidden outposts. Both times, they’d arrived too late. Both times, they’d failed to either save any villagers, or to kill the Destroyer.

  Or to rescue Tal. To everyone else, he was no more than a potentially valuable source of intelligence; he’d lived in the Alloyed Palace for years, and once freed, he could assist the rebellion in a way no one else could. But to her, he was the sole reason for the mission. For him, she drank poison every day.

  For him, she would doom herself.

  “The spies were right. It’s in the Copperreach, praise be to the Unforged God,” her mother said, icy ferocity coating her words and burning in her eyes. “We will make it if we leave now. Are you ready?” She paused for a moment, her gaze darting from the flask to Nyx’s face. Nyx wondered what expression she wore, to put that concerned look on her mother’s face. “It has to be you, you know,” her mother said, putting an end to Nyx’s speculation. Of course. She was worried Nyx might second-guess the mission.

  Nyx lifted the flask to her lips and drank deeply, far more than her usual daily sip. The liquid swirled sourly in her stomach and stung her lips. She set the flask on the table before her, and it made a hollow thunk: the sound of emptiness.

  “I know.”

  When the worst of the pain was over, Nyx returned to herself. The Destroyer was withdrawing her hand. Nyx didn’t know if her expression was still cruel, because she couldn’t see anything but the afterimages of fire, couldn’t smell anything but char, couldn’t feel anything but anguish. Her cheek was pressed to the floor. One of her hands was spasming weakly, scrabbling against the sheet metal like a dying spider. Her skin looked uninjured but she could still feel the burning in her bones.

  She couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  For Tal, she thought fiercely, and forced her head up.

  The Destroyer’s back was to her. The graceful arch of her spine, the gentle angles of her shoulders, the aristocratic tilt of her chin—all of it said that this business affected her not one bit. Nyx wondered if that was all torture was to her: business.

  Then a shudder, light but unmistakable, quivered over the Destroyer’s shoulders. Her cloak of sparks flickered out for barely a second and then flared to life more strongly.

  One of the prisoners—the woman who had cried out a moment ago—inhaled sharply. The sound was quiet but unmistakable.

  Nyx squeezed her eyes shut. She gave herself three heartbeats to gather her courage, to burrow as deep as she could into her hatred. And then she levered herself back up to her knees.

  “You are a fool,” the Destroyer said, not bothering to turn around.

  “And you…” replied Nyx, carefully placing one foot on the ground, her voice coarse and splintered, “are a bitch.”

  The Destroyer glanced over her shoulder. The whites of her eyes gleamed like glacier ice, buried so long in the heart of the mountain that it remembered no sunlight. “‘Bitch’ is what people call women whose power they fear.”

  Nyx swallowed convulsively. She leaned her good shoulder—“good” being very relative—against the wall and pushed herself far enough up to put her other foot on the ground, so that she was no longer kneeling. “It’s also…what they call serial murderesses. So I stand by it.” She was gasping for air by the end of the declaration, and nearly ready to reconsider her commitment to goading her way to her own death.

  The Destroyer turned fully around now. She looked Nyx up and down, reconsidering her. “Why do you fight so hard?” she said softly. “Only loss lies down this path. Whatever you want, it is as far from your reach as the moon.” There was an odd wistfulness to her voice, something childlike, there and gone almost before Nyx could notice it.

  “What do you know of loss?” Nyx snarled.

  The Destroyer quirked an eyebrow, and one corner of her mouth curved up humorlessly. “Nothing. You can’t lose what you’ve never had.”

  “You’ve had everything,” Nyx spat. “You grew up with everything. I had one thing, one precious
person, and then you took him too just because you could.” She inhaled painfully. “Mark my words: one day soon, you will face a reckoning.”

  The Destroyer tilted her head. A calculating light came into her expression. “What is your name?”

  “I told you. Nyx.”

  “No. Your family name.”

  Nyx took a breath. There it was. The Lady of Mercury had guessed her secret. If she was certain enough of her relation to Tal, she would kill Nyx; she seemed obsessed with ensuring no one else had a claim to him. Nyx knew that she was dying, but she couldn’t give in to it just yet. She had to last at least a little longer. Just long enough for her plan to work.

  So she took a strangled breath and met the Destroyer’s eyes. Then she spat on her boots. Red splattered across the finely dyed leather. “Go to hell,” Nyx said, and hated that the words were half a sob.

  The Destroyer stepped forward again.

  he night before, tremors had wracked Nyx’s body as she hurried through the aqueducts. She’d built up enough of a tolerance to the poison that it wouldn’t kill her—the Destroyer would be the one to do that—but it was still havoc on her nerves. She cursed under her breath. She needed to be strong. By the light of the coming dawn, she would be attacking the Destroyer, and if Nyx wasn’t at her prime she could be killed first thing rather than being pursued and captured as she needed to be.

  Ahead of her, a child cried out. Nyx was shepherding one of the last loads of townsfolk through the aqueducts to safety, and just in time too. Above them, an ominous rumble shook dust from the ceiling and made the bricks tremble. Flakes of mortar crumbled away and drifted down like snow.

  “It’s the train,” the child whimpered. “She’s here. We won’t make it!”

  One of the other Saints on the mission, a pale-skinned man with hair so red it was nearly orange, scooped the child up to comfort her. When the girl’s face was turned away, he sent a significant look at Nyx. She nodded at his silent message and then quickly helped him herd them into a side tunnel where they would be better protected from the fire that was about to rain down on the city—and on the hundred-odd soon-to-be-martyred Saints who had volunteered to take the townspeople’s place in their homes tonight. The Destroyer would know if the city she burned was empty, but she’d be none the wiser to incinerating the wrong people.

  Some of the Saints would survive, though. It was all part of the plan. All Nyx had to do was her bit, and allow the toxin flowing through her veins to do its own part.

  The poison had been formulated by her mother working in conjunction with a copper Smith, and was made by dissolving hemlock oil in an enchanted copper suspension. It was created to be absorbed by the body of the one who drank it—and then transmitted to anyone who channeled magic into the drinker.

  Nyx was immune.

  The Destroyer wasn’t.

  This time, Nyx didn’t return to herself.

  She couldn’t bear it any longer. Not the agony, not the smell of burning hair and skin blistering from the inside, not the contradictory planes and angles of her captor’s expression. She floated instead, drifting just below the surface of the pain, peering into the dim, distorted light of the prison in the way a swimmer sees the sun from deep underwater.

  “No!” cried a voice, cutting through the haze. The word rang across the iron bars and bounced painfully inside Nyx’s skull. Distantly, she thought that it sounded like her mother.

  An errant tear, or perhaps a bead of blood, slid across Nyx’s nose. Against her will she resurfaced. The distorted light turned into flickering sparks. The Destroyer was walking away, frowning down at her hands, where colorful flames wheeled about like a kaleidoscope. She must have realized something was wrong, that something was affecting her magic. If she walked away now, that was all it would do: drain her magic, weaken her until her body recovered. It wouldn’t kill her.

  Nyx’s gaze slid sideways. Like metal meeting a magnet, she found the eyes of the woman in the next cell, one of the “captured townsfolk”—the one who’d cried out earlier, and again just now. The woman’s skin was a darker brown than Nyx’s own but their cheekbones were the same. Their eyes were the same too, had always been lit with the same ferocity. Nyx’s hair was long where the woman’s was cropped short, but the memory of the woman’s fingers still lingered in Nyx’s braids.

  Mom. Nyx’s mouth formed the word, though no sound escaped.

  Her mother swallowed. Nyx could barely make out the bob of her throat through the gloom and the flickering sparks as the Destroyer opened the cell door.

  Her mother’s jaw tightened and her gaze grew urgent. You must do it, she’d called out earlier. To the Destroyer, it would have sounded like she was begging Nyx to give up so the torture would end. But Nyx knew she’d meant the opposite.

  Nyx shook her head, a pitiful motion, barely a tremor as her cheek pressed deeper into the floor. She couldn’t do this. Not any longer.

  But the Destroyer was halfway out the door already, and if she left, it meant Nyx had failed. It meant Tal would be forever lost. And, Nyx reasoned despairingly, she herself was already likely going to die anyway. At this point there really was no hope of winning back her life, only of eking out a little more time. If she traded away that time, she could free her brother. She could make it all mean something. She could win.

  She could still win. She could still make it worth it.

  There was one thing that could make the Destroyer stop, could make her turn around, could make her come back to finish the job she’d started. Your family name, the Destroyer had demanded a moment ago.

  Nyx forced in a breath. “Melaine,” she whispered.

  And the Destroyer turned around.

  BESIDE TAL’S COT, AN EMBOSSED CLAY CUP ROLLED back and forth with the motion of the train. The dregs of his tea dribbled out with each pass, turning the carpet soggy and fragrant with the scent of gold-infused sleeping draught. He’d requested triple his usual dose from the kitchens, but it had still taken nearly twenty minutes for the medicinal herbs and golden sleep magic to force Tal into an uneasy rest.

  To a silver Smith, sleep was like being buried at the heart of the earth: encased in granite, enveloped in an immense, directionless pressure. This was what he feared. This was what he faced every night, what he fought every time he dared to sleep. He was surrounded by the vast, gentle, inescapable weight of his god, and he could not take another instant of it.

  Tal tried to breathe. There was no breath to be had in this silent nowhere, though, and no body here for him to breathe with. This was the in-between place, the almost-dreaming place. If he concentrated, he could move past it, step beyond the disorienting pressure and into his normal nightmares. But that wasn’t why he was here.

  He was distantly aware of the tautness of his muscles, of the coarse linen sheets that were crumpled in his grip. The tea had drawn sleep over his mind but did nothing to relax his body, which would have betrayed his terror and rage to anyone who could see. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, he thought bitterly to himself, that the Destroyer wasn’t here to notice?

  The pressure—the presence—that surrounded Tal’s sleeping mind began to lighten. A rushing sensation built in his gut, making him dizzy. And then all at once everything simply released: no pressure, no weight, nothing tethering him to the world or to himself. It was as if gravity had suddenly reversed, and he was plummeting headlong into the great emptiness between the stars.

  The vision was about to start.

  My sister, he said, throwing the words into the empty blackness. Show me how I save my sister.

  He briefly considered what else he should add. He used to worship in this time. Used to fall bodiless through the midst of his god and pray, so very certain of his belonging. Then, later, this was the time he begged and wept, clinging desperately to his fraying belief that his god had brought him low for a reason—that somehow, his pain would serve a purpose. But there had been no answer to any of it. Tal had wished then that he could be like one o
f the unbelievers, that he could imagine the Unforged God was an ancient myth, nothing but a fascinating story that had never been true. He hated that he knew otherwise. Hated that he could sense the god who had betrayed him in every dream, in every beat of his heart, in every ounce of his silver blood.

  Maybe if he begged again. Maybe if he pleaded. If it was his suffering that sated his god, Tal could give it, to save Nyx. But when he tried to form the words of a plea, something within him rebelled, unwilling to be so vulnerable again in front of the one he used to trust.

  You owe me, he said instead at last, blasphemy though it was. You owe me this much.

  The vision slammed into place around him. The dizziness stopped abruptly. His stomach surged, and in his bed, his body curled in on itself as he tried desperately to not be sick. The vision was of a dilapidated cabin that smelled of copper and hemlock, and housed a woman and a girl. The woman he recognized as Saasha—his father’s on-again off-again first wife, who was Nyx’s mother. She’d cut her hair since he’d seen her last. It hugged her scalp now in a short black halo, but beneath it, her eyes burned with the same fanatical devotion Tal had always recognized.

  It has to be you, you know, she said. Her mouth moved with no sound. The meaning of the words simply slid into Tal’s consciousness, in the way of dreams.

  Nyx lifted a flask—the source of the hemlock smell, which Tal would recognize anywhere, because Saasha was an apothecist. Their house had smelled of nightshade and gingko and lavender and flax ever since he was seven years old and newly orphaned.

  Nyx tipped the flask and drained the contents. Alarm spiked through Tal’s veins as he registered what she’d done, what she’d drank. With the strength of his emotion, the vision distorted, going milky and grainy.