Despite his bravado, Detan’s mouth went dry. “Does Thratia know about this?”
Ranalae said, “My dear, she does not care.”
Selium he could not sense while Aella kept him locked down poured from Ranalae’s sleeves, a neat little trick that he suspected was part of the latest Valathean fashion. He stepped back as the cloud billowed toward him, the raw glimmer temporarily blinding him.
“When did he last have his injection?” Ranalae asked. He could only see pieces of her now, a flesh of arm, a curve of a cheek, through the swathe of selium coalescing around him. He wanted to scream, to swat it back, but he knew that they wanted him to fight. Knew that, to test his control, they were going to make him suffer. Damned evil thing, having your deviant sensitivity tied to your anger. He wished his mother would have lived long enough to tell him how she dealt with their burden.
“Right before we left for Hond Steading. I wanted to test how long the effects would last, and his ability without regular maintenance.”
“Hmm, interesting. You have the capability to make more with you?”
“Of course. I have a fresh vial on me, in fact.”
“Wonderful.”
He could scarcely hear them over the thundering of his heart. The realization came to him, rather belatedly, that he had not had much direct interaction with Ranalae in the Bone Tower. He had no idea what her sel-sensitivity was like – deviant, or imperial standard. If she were deviant, than the sel getting close and personal with him now was real bad news.
He opened his mouth to protest, to ramble, to stall whatever was about to happen, and choked as sel poured down his throat.
“Ah, there we go,” Ranalae said. “Knew he couldn’t keep from speaking for long. Are you prepared?”
“I am.”
“Trigger Callia now, please?”
“Certainly.”
Detan clawed the air in front of him, indistinct wisps of selium tickling the fine hairs on his hands, the aching cuts in his palm fading now as his mind burst with panic. They would not kill him here, he told himself. Not intentionally.
But all his calming techniques had been stripped from him – his deep breaths, his distracting banter. His coping methods crumbled around him and he wanted to scream but the breath just wouldn’t come and he fell to one knee, eyes bulging, clawing at the ground as if he could dig his way to clear air. Nails bent back, cuts opened wider, a little pool of slick blood spread beneath his hands and he’d be pits-cursed if he wouldn’t rather be drowning in that than sel and he tried, tried so damn hard, to open his senses. To grasp the sel being shoved inside him and rip it out and bore it straight through Ranalae’s thrice-cursed eyes and oh holy fuck he was going to die here bug-eyed and useless and what was the fucking point after all–
Callia’s ability hit him.
Perversion. That was what she was. Long before Aella’s poisons had reduced her to a withered husk of a woman, Callia’s deviant ability had been the corruption of everything good – an extension of herself, if Aella’s theory of deviancy was true – and the poison had only concentrated that vileness.
He roiled with it. Every muscle in his body twitched and shuddered and clenched and cramped as his body fought against what Callia did to the selium inside him. It was not changed, not fundamentally, and he kept on telling himself that but all his body knew was that the selium inside him was now poison – rot and bile and decay – and he had to get it out.
His throat spasmed as he tried to scream though he had no air to do it with. Limbs he only vaguely recognized as his own twitched and writhed on the floor he’d bloodied.
He was dying and he knew it and something inside him broke.
A fire in his veins. Fire that was not his, had never really been his, that simply coexisted with him because it had no choice, burned within him hotter than anything he’d ever felt in his entire life. Some distant part of him wondered if this was the fire that had eaten his mother up – not bonewither, not after all – and was silenced. The fire would not die with him. It wanted release, and Detan was a whole pits-lot stronger than anyone had ever expected.
Aella’s will held his sel-sense in check, that part of him that he had mastered, in a sphere of influence. He was aware of her range now as if it were his own, as if he could see a fine gleam of a soapy bubble wrapping them both, keeping him from affecting any selium within its volume.
But Detan’s sphere, the fire’s sphere, was bigger. A lot bigger.
He fought it as he realized what was happening, what was going to happen. Clamped down on everything that he was, everything that he could be. But his body panicked and reached without his consent and–
Screaming. Curses. The floor juddered under him, the thunderous crack of stone filled the air and not just nearby – it was heavy and hollow and huge. And the whoomph of what came next shook him to his very bones.
The selium withdrew in a rush, the perversion with it, and all his strength fled.
He lay limp and shuddering, overworked muscles pinging and twitching with jelly-soft weakness. For once, just once, his mind was truly blank, as if everything that he was had been siphoned free, drained out in that one terrible moment.
“What have you done?” Aella demanded. Her small hands grabbed his shoulders and shook him until his eyes slid open. Real fear etched her young face. He’d never seen anything like it before.
He tried to say something, anything, but his mouth was mealy and his lips wouldn’t obey. Misol crouched at his side, grabbed a fistful of his too-fancy coat and dragged him to his limp feet. He wanted to fall, everything in his body wanted to fall, but she wouldn’t let him. She shoved him along until his hips rammed into a windowsill.
Ranalae stood next to him at that window, her fingers clutching the rail as she leaned forward to see better. If he had any strength left in him, he would have pushed her out.
“I had him shut down!” Aella protested against reality, stomping her small foot.
People were running in the halls. The air tasted of ash. He squinted against the light, too dark for the hour, and saw –
The firemount nearest the palace had awoken. Grey soot spilled from its mouth, illuminated from underneath by the orange-red smear of molten rock. Same color as his cuffs, he thought bitterly. Thratia had gotten that much right.
The echo of its awakening thrummed in him still. A pocket of selium, near to the conical plug, had been his target, and now the people at the base of that firemount were paying for Ranalae’s experiments. He wanted to ask how bad it was – if there was anything he could do, anything at all, that might help, but his mouth still wouldn’t work and it was getting really hard to keep his eyes open.
“Beautiful,” Ranalae murmured.
Detan vowed to make her suffer as he slipped into unconsciousness.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ripka was less comfortable with the stability of the upstairs floor than she was with the entire situation. Every step they took the boards creaked in protest, and some of the steps up to the second floor swayed alarmingly. By the time they reached Laella’s office, she was sweating, and it had nothing at all to do with the mild weather.
“This place is a deathtrap,” Ripka said.
Laella threw herself backward into an overstuffed chair, arms splayed out across the cushions, and shrugged. “It was what I could afford, and the natural ambiance is a draw for the well-to-dos around here. They feel like they’re getting away with something, even though the place is legally owned. I’m no squatter.”