98. HOW TO KILL A MIMIC
Talon’s story
The Marakori war camp
After the fight with Anlyr
Talon ran. She ran like death was chasing her and hoped that Anlyr was too busy doing whatever a good lackey of Relos Var’s did to chase.
Sadly, he had nothing better to do.
She heard his steps behind her, heard him laugh. She didn’t dare look back. All around her, Nemesan’s soldiers looked confused by the sight of one of their own in such a panic. At least, they were confused until they saw the tentacles, the ones she couldn’t just dismiss at will because of whatever the fuck it was Anlyr had done. A spell, clearly. Maybe a spell wrapped around a poison. But how to heal the damage was less obvious, and she was out of time.
So, the shouting started right away.
No point but to lean into it, she decided. Maybe Warmonger had strong enough hooks into this crew by this point to make appealing to their paranoia a valid tactic.
Talon screamed as she pointed back toward Anlyr. “He cursed me! Look what he did to my arm! He’s a spy!”
All that attention reoriented itself to the man behind her.
Anlyr laughed under his breath. “Oh, you little…”
She lost what he said after that. Talon grabbed some poor idiot’s winter cloak and wrapped it around her tentacles like she was carrying a load of laundry. Talon needed to get out of there fast. Everything was starting to hurt, and several spots on her arms and side had begun to bleed. She wasn’t wearing real clothing this time—she’d known she’d have to counterfeit uniforms—but now she was rubbing open wounds on herself every time she moved. She was forced to tear off her “cape” (and do so without screaming too, which surely earned her an extra helping of dessert and a kiss on the cheek), before dressing herself in the cloak she’d stolen. The cloak would help hide both the tentacles and the bleeding, she hoped. She picked up a sword, although all she could do was hold the thing in her hand since she couldn’t create a scabbard for it
Talon searched for the source of the explosions, hoping she might find some kind of aid. But as she moved that way, she did a double take as she passed by the extra-obvious ritual site.
She was wrong about not knowing the man performing the ritual, for one thing. With a better look, Talon recognized Professor Tillinghast from the Alavel Academy. She recognized several attendants as the highest-ranked members of the wizards’ school too, the sort who never left the Academy. Certainly not to hop over to Marakor and perform magical rituals for god-kings. Yet here they were.
Equally disturbing, the ritual apparently required an extra push of tenyé—a row of men had been lined up for the purpose. She would’ve thought they were slaves, but the uniforms belied that idea. They weren’t gagged either but patiently kneeling. Talon sensed a little worry and concern, but not the out-of-control fear and panic she would expect from people condemned to death. Some were even excited to die for the glory and triumph of their new king.
The levels of tenyé made Talon pause. It was too much. Too much for a diversion. People here were going to die, and while yes, Relos Var was willing to do that, if the ritual was genuine and they were powering it with this much energy …
Then this wasn’t a decoy.
“Shit,” she said. The others were looking through the camp for a ritual that either didn’t exist or would be a trap. The real ritual was happening right out in the open. Somebody had to warn them, and Talon didn’t know how far along the ritual was. She could try—
In her condition? Please.
She started to leave when she felt the burning, white-hot pain of a sword slicing into her back, bursting out through her stomach. She screamed, shock and surprise warring with a childlike indignation. It had never hurt that badly to be stabbed before. Rude.
Anlyr pulled his sword from the wound and then stabbed her again, this time through the neck, through the spine. Talon had a fleeting moment of wondering why he hadn’t aimed for her heart, then realized he’d expected her to move it.
Which, to be fair, she had.
Everything moved slowly after that. She heard the slow sound of footsteps, low and sharp and loud as thunder, as Anlyr walked away. His spell slipped off her with a prickly sweet tingle, control released now that it had done its job.
The world tilted sideways and drained away.
Then the world turned white, like being dragged backward from a cave into sunlight, dazzling in intensity.
Talon opened her eyes.
She was on the ground. She would have laughed if she had the lung capacity for it. But even as she had the thought, she realized her heart wasn’t beating. She pulled no air into her lungs. But somehow …
Anlyr’s spell had faded. She concentrated on healing her wounds, drawing the flesh together without making it obvious.
The other mimic hadn’t gone far. He stood to the side, scanning the crowd as the Academy wizards continued the ritual. She kept her eyes closed while she opened other eyes in less conspicuous places so she might continue observing him. And this time, study him.
He was wearing talismans. She wouldn’t have expected it, but he hadn’t shape-changed except to heal the wound from her initial attack, had he? He wasn’t wearing his natural form, true, but he could’ve done that earlier. Just fun morphing to shift his appearance, and then wear his talismans. Anlyr had returned to the same methods he always used—a wizard duelist using his powers to augment his speed and dexterity. The fact that he covered himself in enough talismans to hinder easy shape-changing just meant he would only polymorph under the direst of emergencies—to fix being cut in half, for example.
The problem with being a mimic (one of many, many problems—so many problems—people had no idea) was that any shape that couldn’t survive on its own had to be supported with magic. Moving one’s heart or even one’s brain around wasn’t a problem, except that one had to continue to spend tenyé to maintain the new location or put it somewhere that it would function successfully on its own. And weird fact: it turned out that it was really, really hard for the human brain to function when relocated to any other part of the human body besides the skull. Craniums were just fantastic brain homes, whereas most other places in the body kind of sucked at it. Go figure.
All of which was to say that there was an excellent chance that Anlyr’s brain was in his skull at that very moment. If Anlyr suddenly lost his head, he might really die. And unlike Talon, he didn’t have a friendly Death Goddess that had given him a one-use-only invitation to Return from the dead.
Talon would have one shot, and she couldn’t afford to fuck it up. She’d have prayed to Taja/Talea, but that would only be a distraction for Talea, assuming the woman could hear her at all. Talon—Lyrilyn—began chanting a different kind of prayer to herself.
She channeled the knowledge she carried from two of the many different personalities lodged inside her: Surdyeh and Kihrin. Surdyeh had been a paid member of the House D’Jorax Revelers. He knew some shit when it came to drawing a crowd’s attention.
Across the way, people turned as a sudden explosion of triumphant fanfare and sparkling confetti filled the air.
Everyone looked toward the unexpected sound except Anlyr, who turned to face the other direction. But even if he had been looking in the right direction, he still wouldn’t have seen Talon, who’d turned invisible.1 She feinted with two attacks, knowing he would have no choice but to dodge to the side. She let Kihrin’s skills direct the strike.
Screams and shouts rang out around her as she landed, still invisible. Anlyr’s body slid off her blade arm with a wet, disgusting sound. Soldiers began looking for the assassin, but Talon only had eyes for the wizard finishing the ritual.
Wait. No.
Silver flashed in the professor’s hand. Before Talon could move, he’d ripped open the throat of the first soldier in line. She still should’ve had enough time to stop the others, to close with the man or cast a spell or do something. The wizard must have bound the men sympathetically, because as he slit one throat, he slit them all, simultaneously.
The ritual wasn’t playing around. The men dissolved into ash, flaking away like the bark of a heavy log in the fire. All their physical matter destroyed and converted to tenyé in an instant. The light around the circle intensified. That same glowing light shot up from the edges of the ritual circle, then spread out in eight glowing petals. Each flare spread out in the morning sky before all eight lines came together and streaked toward a singular destination.
Talon inhaled sharply.
The light show was beautiful, sure, except for what it meant. The new Eight, a group that included both Galen and Talea, were about to be stripped of their conceptual connections.
They were about to either be dead or powerless.
She prayed, prayed, prayed to any damn power that would listen that they’d just give in, not resist, not fight it. If they cooperated, they’d live. Galen. Talea. She wasn’t ready to lose them. She didn’t want to add them to her collection. She didn’t want to do that anymore!
Maybe they wouldn’t fight it. They wouldn’t resist. Either way, they’d lose their powers, but at least they wouldn’t die.
But she suspected some of them would be too stubborn.
“It’s not fair,” she muttered. “It’s not fair! I was doing the right thing this time!” Talon eyed the soldiers around her with murderous rage.
She smiled as her hands turned into claws.