HIS OTHER MEMORIES OF grief involved time slipping away. Oil beading on water. The sudden lack of presence in his own life, the self-protective drifting.
He wished he had that now.
Now, he felt every tick and every hour. Vakrez had come by that morning to a dead-eyed stare, closed his fingers over the pulse in Akos’s wrist, and left. Vakrez’s hands were cold and clammy and then gone.
A few days passed before he was summoned to Lazmet’s side again. This time he was brought to the Weapons Hall, the place where he had first learned his fate. Of course, it wasn’t really his fate, but he had carried it around for seasons anyway. Don’t trust your heart, that fate had told him, and he’d hated it for that reason.
Now, he thought it maybe had a point.
Lazmet was staring at the wall of weapons, tapping his chin. It was like he was picking out a cheese, Akos thought, and he wondered if he was about to experience some kind of new horror, in which his own father systematically broke his bones or carved out pieces of his flesh. It seemed like the kind of thing Lazmet might do. Out of curiosity.
It wasn’t until she moved out of the shadows that he saw Yma was there. There was a warning in her stare, when she gave it to him. And then her mask was back on, that enigmatic smile, the elegant posture. Knowing what he now knew about her, he recognized that she would never be comfortable this way, in a gown, in a manor, playing games with royalty.
“Thank you for your report, Yma,” Lazmet said. “You can go.”
Yma inclined her head, though Lazmet wasn’t looking, still spellbound by the wall of weapons. She brushed Akos’s arm on her way out, the brief touch giving some kind of comfort. And a reminder.
“Come here,” Lazmet said to him. “I want to show you something.”
Akos was supposed to be acting like he was slipping into Lazmet’s control, piece by piece, so he climbed the steps to the dais. The room had an eerie green cast to it, light glowing through the row of jars on shelves up higher than Akos’s head. White orbs floated in the jars, suspended in green liquid. Preservative.
They were eyes. Akos tried not to think about it.
“We’re not a culture that keeps mementos. After all, that would suggest we trust in some kind of permanence, and the Shotet have always known that objects, places . . . they can be lost in an instant.” Lazmet gestured to the wall of weapons. “Weapons, though, we allow ourselves to pass down. They’re still useful, you see. So you can trace the history of our family here, on this wall.”
He reached for a hatchet on the far left. The blade was rusty from disuse, the metal handle still cloudy with fingerprints.
“We’re an old Shotet family, but not old money,” Lazmet said, touching his finger to the hatchet blade. “My grandfather killed his way to prominence in our society. This hatchet was his handiwork. He was a weapons maker. Not particularly talented. What he lacked in artistry he made up for in brutality, when he served in the Shotet army.”
He put the hatchet away, moving along to a staff. At each end of it were the mechanisms Akos recognized from currentblade handles. When Lazmet held it, dark tendrils of current wrapped around first one end of the staff, and then the other.
“My wife’s design,” Lazmet said, with a smile that almost seemed fond. “She was not a talented fighter, but she was theatrical. She knew how to be beautiful, and charming, and intimidating, all at the same time. It’s a shame her life was claimed by someone so . . . unworthy of it.”
Akos schooled his features to stay blank.
“I brought you here to eat,” Lazmet said. “On your . . . restricted diet . . . I recognize I can’t completely deny you food. So I thought we might have dinner.”
There was a table on the dais, pushed up against the far wall. It didn’t seem big enough for the kind of grand dinners that Lazmet probably had, but it was long, about the width of Akos’s armspan, and had a seat at either end. Akos thought this was probably all a part of Lazmet’s strategy, forcing him to eat in the greenish light under jars of eyeballs, in full view of all the weapons the Noavek family had used to bleed their way to the top of Shotet society. He was meant to be unsettled by this.
“I’m not really in a position to refuse dinner,” Akos said.
“No, you certainly aren’t,” Lazmet said, smirking as he put the staff back in its place. Near the edge of the wall of weapons was a bell, built into the wall. He rang it, and gestured to the table for Akos to sit down. Akos did, his head swimming. The food Yma had given him was just enough that he felt his hunger all the time. He drank glass after glass of water just to give his body the impression that it was full of something.
The fenzu that usually swarmed in the globular chandelier were half-dead and needed to be replaced. Akos could see the husks of their bodies collected at the bottom of each glass globe, little prickly legs up in the air.
“Vakrez tells me you are too consumed with self-hatred for him to get a meaningful reading,” Lazmet said. “Yma assures me that you are progressing. That a vulnerable heart is easier to bend.”
Akos didn’t answer. Sometimes he wondered if Yma was playing a game with him. Indulging his desire to kill his father while worming her way in to do her actual work. He had no way of knowing that she was on his side, not really, except her word.
A wall panel behind Lazmet pulled back, and three servants filed into the Weapons Hall, carrying plates covered with protective domes of gleaming metal. They set one plate in front of Lazmet, one in front of Akos, and a third in the center of the table, then backed away. Akos didn’t see if they left or if they simply fell into the shadows.
“I am familiar with how guilty people think, though I myself find guilt to be a worthless emotion,” Lazmet said. “Why feel bad for a thing you did with full conviction, after all?” He hadn’t sat down yet. He snapped his fingers, and one of the servants came forward with a cup made of etched glass. She poured something into it, something dark purple and thick, and Lazmet drank.
“I know that you are thinking there may still be time to undo what you have done to your friend,” Lazmet said. “It’s a last effort to maintain the part of your identity that I most need you to let go of. You are someone who thinks in extremes, and you have placed me, my family, perhaps all of Shotet, in an untouchable, unreachable place inside you that you have labeled ‘bad.’”
He reached across the table to the dome in the center, and lifted it. The plate was empty but for a jar, a smaller version of the ones lining the walls. It, too, held greenish preservative. And bobbing inside it were two white globes.
Akos tasted bile and roasted deadbird. He could have looked away. He already knew what was in the jar. He didn’t need to keep looking—
One of the globes turned, showing a dark iris.
“I take one eye if I intend to let someone live,” Lazmet said. “I take both if they are executed, as Jorek Kuzar was at midnight last night.”
Akos swallowed reflexively, and forced himself to close his eyes. If he kept looking, he would vomit. And he would not give Lazmet the satisfaction of seeing him vomit.
“The truth,” Lazmet said softly, “is that you cannot undo what you have done. It’s too late. You will never be able to return to the people you once counted as friends. So you may as well let go, Akos.”
There was horror somewhere at the edge of his mind, so close he could touch it without difficulty, if he dared. He breathed, and drew away from it. Not now, not yet.
What is your mission?
Akos opened his eyes, staring up at the man whose blood and bone and flesh had conspired to create him.
To kill Lazmet Noavek, came the answer, clearer now than ever before.
Lazmet sat down across from him, and uncovered his plate, offering the dome to the servant behind him. On his plate was a roll, a piece of cooked meat, and a whole fruit, its peel still on. Lazmet frowned at it.
“I didn’t think this shipment would come for another week yet,” he said, picking up the fruit. Akos recognized the peel from when he had broken into Lazmet’s office.
A green glimmer caught his eye just over Lazmet’s shoulder. The wall panel had slid back, silent, and a dark head was jutting out of the opening. The head lifted, showing a sliver of silverskin, and a pair of sharp, dark eyes.
Behind Lazmet, Cyra raised a currentblade about the length of her forearm, and made to stab him in the back. Akos didn’t stir an izit.
Lazmet, however, lifted a hand, as if signaling for another glass of whatever it was he was drinking. And Cyra’s hand stopped, right in the middle of her downward swing.
“Cyra,” Lazmet said. “How kind of you to remember my favorite fruit.”