Inherit the Flame

Chapter Eighteen

Pelkaia entered the house of her enemy.

By some trick of fate and misfortune of trust she was welcome here, welcome in the austere halls of the Honding family palace. Tibal had vouched for her, or perhaps Ripka, speaking of her exploits of the past and her goals for the deviants of the future. Or – and this gave her a little frisson of amusement to consider – Detan himself had, perhaps, written to his aunt and given Pelkaia praise.

The reasons didn’t matter. They were all lies, anyway. What mattered was that, despite how she had come by the freedom, Pelkaia mounted the steps to the Honding palace and entered its doors a free woman, without suspicion.

She hadn’t even bothered putting on a Valathean-bred face. She wore her own countenance, relishing the feel of the sere air on sand-dune smooth cheeks she’d been pressed to keep hidden for the vast majority of her adult life. The Hondings, and the citizenry of their city, did not fear her heritage. Though, truth be told, she drew a few questioning glances.

No, the people of Hond Steading had forgotten their past, and hers. Forgotten it was their arrival, the lure in their blood toward the firemounts of this cursed city, that had brought Valathea’s hungry might down upon the Scorched continent. That had rolled her people back into barren lands, and mingled their bloods until an entirely new people sprang up on the intersection of Valathea and Catari.

The people of the Scorched.

Despite her distaste for their origins, Pelkaia could not bring herself to loathe them as she should. She had better enemies to fan her hatred with.

She spotted a likely black-jacketed guard lingering near the doorway and approached, all easy smiles and open body language. It’d taken her a while to reclaim an easy, non-threatening posture after she’d given up masquerading with Ripka’s stiff formality, but once she had it back it came easily to her, though she could not articulate why that was. Perhaps some echo from her childhood, or from her first time as a mother. From a time before her world had begun to be shredded, slowly, to bloodied pieces.

Whatever the reason, her easy stroll put the guard at ease, receptive to her request. Detan’s manipulation tactics must be rubbing off. But no, that wasn’t fair. She’d been a serpent in a ball gown long before Detan Honding had ever had the misfortune of stumbling into her life.

“Good morning,” she said to the guard and bobbed her head politely. “Could you point me toward Nouli Bern’s quarters? This place is so large, I’ve already forgotten the way.”

The guard hesitated, the slightest flicker of indecision. Nouli’s presence here was protected, as Pelkaia well knew. Not even the citizens of the city knew their leading family’s palace harbored the man who’d help engineer Valathea’s greatest weapons of war. But Pelkaia was a known entity to the guards: accepted, safe. And she knew the man’s name – simply knowing that he was here at all was key enough to open that door.

The guard checked to be sure her post was covered by fellow eyes, then inclined her head in practiced solicitude. Pelkaia had to hand it to old Dame Honding, she had her people trained to within an inch of their lives.

“This way please, miss.”

Pelkaia threw the remaining guard a friendly smile and trailed after her mark, making sure not to look too eager nor too disinterested. She marked the path, letting the guard see as she murmured assurances to herself that this was the right route after all. It didn’t matter that she’d never seen these particular halls before; she needed the guard to believe this was little more than a refresher.

“Here you are, miss.” The guard paused in front of a door toward the end of a lower level, set well away from the bulk of the residences, so far as Pelkaia could tell, in a wing that offered a low, sloped roof over what had to be Nouli’s rooms. No doubt he’d been sequestered here, away from the bustle of the palace’s everyday happenings, to both keep him out of sight, and his experiments from affecting anyone should they go awry.

Pelkaia half-stepped toward the door, only to be met with an upraised palm from the guard. “You must enter without knocking – the door is always unlocked – and shut it carefully behind you. Stand with your back to the door, beside the candelabra, and wait for Nouli to acknowledge you. Do not speak to him, or startle him in any way.”

Pelkaia flashed a smile. “Thank you, dear, but I’m familiar with Master Bern’s peculiarities.”

The guard shrugged. “Rules are rules, miss. Dame’s orders that everyone who approaches this door be reminded of them. Got her nethers in a twist over the man’s experiments, if you ask me. Worried he’ll knock the whole place down if he so much as sees a sandrat.”

“The Dame has reason for her caution, I’m sure.”

The guard twitched at her weapons belt, letting the heavy weight of her tools reassure her. “Everyone has an extra helping of caution, these days. Holler if you need anything, miss. But not too loud.”

Pelkaia ran her fingers across her lips as if stitching them shut, and the guard tipped her helmet before hurrying off back to her post. She let the guard’s steps fade into the distance before she peeled the door open. The hinges had been well-oiled, it glided wide with only the tiniest of efforts.

The sight made her breath catch. Master Bern, it seemed, had been given every possible item he could ever need, and then some. She slipped within the cavernous room and shut the door, lingering in the position indicated, while she let her eyes adjust to the oily light.

More than the accouterments of a chemist or engineer dotted the huge room. This was a space gone over to experimentation. Aside from the litter of instruments and notebooks across all the tables, Nouli had also been granted a small greenhouse for plant life. Though the plants were clustered in a glass-lined corner far from where Pelkaia waited, she recognized some of those glossy, leafy fronds, and took heart.

Nouli, in his genius, had not neglected the study of apothiks. Ripka had intimated as much when she brought him aboard Pelkaia’s ship. He’d trembled in those first few days, claiming need of rest but clearly needing something more. Pelkaia had suspected drug abuse of some kind. She’d never dreamed he had knowledge of some of her old Catari remedies, too. Their conversation had yet to begin, and already she was brimming with confidence.

Paper on paper rustled somewhere in the back of the work room, the subtle clinking of glass. Pelkaia stood stock still alongside the candelabra, waiting patiently for the master to sense her presence. She’d heard Ripka’s story of the conflagration he’d kicked off in his workshop back on the Remnant, and did not wish to see a live demonstration.

She hadn’t long to wait. Nouli shuffled forward, favoring his left leg with a hardwood cane, his thick glasses sunk low on a nose long-dented by the nose grips. He squinted at Pelkaia, taking in her purebred Catari countenance, and nodded to himself.

“Pelkaia Teria, isn’t it? The captain of my rescue ship. What can I do for you, Captain?”

“I am that.” She darted a look around the room. Though it was huge, and doubtless branched into an opulent set of sleeping quarters, Pelkaia was no fool to the workings of such things. Nouli Bern did not leave the Honding palace. Ever. “Though I wonder how successful I was in my rescue.”

He shuffled over to sit on a stool very near her and leaned his cane against his knee. “Not a subtle woman, are you?”

She shrugged. “The older I get, the thinner my patience for delicacy of speech.”

“A dangerous mood, that one. Careful wording is an art to be mastered, not a relic to be discarded when one feels they’ve outgrown it.” He eyed her, slowly and carefully, as she had expected. “Though that is something you will learn in time. You are not nearly old enough to be so cynical of politeness.”

And just like that, he’d sidled so easily into her trap. It was almost a pity, really. She missed a good head to fence with – a manipulator as keen on the craft as she was – but this would do. She hadn’t expected otherwise, truly. Nouli was a genius in a practical way. He expected people to be as straightforward as his equations were.

“You flatter me, Master Bern. But you do forget – I am Catari, and of a particular line. Or had you not heard the rumors?”

“Rumors?” He leaned forward, fingers curled tight over the knob of his cane to steady himself.

“That the mixed-bloods of the Scorched live just as long, if not longer, than the pure of Valathea, despite the harsher climate. And, it must be said, put off the more aesthetic ravages of age quite longer.”

“Tosh.” He slumped back and waved a dismissive hand. “I’ve heard the rumors, everyone likes a good fairytale, but I’m of mixed blood myself, my dear, and as you can see such mingling has not been so kind to me as the stories would suggest.”

A bitter undercurrent caught her attention and swept it away. Anger that had nothing at all to do with the fading of his looks, nor his health, lay like a frond of spines beneath his words. It was no grand leap to puzzle out what would make a man like Nouli so deeply resentful.

“It’s a subtle effect in the mixed, diluted as it is, and distributed amongst people who do not live nor eat the way the Catari have.”

He snorted. “Clean living and thick blood, those are your suggestions? I could have told any fool the same, it is the thing most prescribed by all backwater apothiks. Good knowledge, yes, but hardly revolutionary.”

“Incomplete knowledge,” Pelkaia said, and saw his eyes narrow with interest. “Due to… poor relations between Valatheas and Catari early on, my people failed to share certain insights with their new neighbors. Certain… recipes.”

From within her tunic pocket she produced a small vial of elixir. It was not enough to perform miracles, for it was diluted and extracted from plants not grown in the traditional ways, but it was enough to keep Pelkaia’s mind quick. Or, at the very least, to restore it from abject sluggishness.

Nouli was not a slow man, despite whatever age had done to him. He licked his lips, eyeing the little thumb-thick cylinder of stoppered glass. “And that is what, exactly? Some potion of youth? If you’ve come to peddle me fables, Captain, I’d ask you to save the interruption for dinner tonight, when I won’t be postponing important work for entertainment’s sake.”

“Your skepticism is welcome. There is no magic in this vial, no one remedy to heal all the ills of time. It is, if anything, a stopgap, a momentary measure of restoration. But it does work, Master Bern, I can promise you that. It may be no miracle, but it can make your thoughts move easier, for a while. Something about removing old oil from the brain matter – the true function has been lost to time and war. But I recall the making of it, all the same.”

He scowled. “You expect me to what, exactly? Take your word and drink down this concoction? It could be poison, for all I know. Or some bitter tea that will only grant me indigestion.”

“I expect you to do nothing blindly, Master. I expect you to draw off samples, set it beneath your magnification glasses and probe around in its making. Perhaps even feed it to a sandrat to judge the results. What you do to assure yourself doesn’t matter to me. Only know that you must have half this amount remaining, when you finally decide to drink it, for it to have any effect at all.”

She tossed it to him, end over end in a gleaming arc, and he fumbled forward, knocking his cane aside in his haste to save the thin glass from dashing against the hard floor. “You Catari have kept your secrets close, always. Why now? Why give this to me now, if it is indeed what you say it is?”

Such a clever man. Perhaps he was not so blind to her manipulations as she had expected. She caught herself smiling. A lively mark in Nouli was going to make this game much more entertaining. “If I told you I was dying, would you believe me?”

His lashes fluttered as he blinked in shock. “I would have no reason not to, but you seem in good health, why do you…?” He trailed off, eyeing the vial in his hand thoughtfully. She could tell from the furrow on his brow she did not need to explain to him why she appeared in good health when she was, in fact, dissolving from the inside out.

“I wish for something of my people to live on, once I am gone.”

He picked his gaze off the vial and stared at her. “Your people continue, out in the desert. They will not die with you, my dear.”

“No, but knowledge is a tenuous thing. Better to store it in as many safe places as possible, don’t you think?”

He frowned. “But that is not all.”

“No, no, of course not. Someday – someday soon – I may require a favor of you in return.”

She watched the balance of scales shift in his mind, watched the wary guardedness seep back into his expression and posture. Here was not a man used to wagering his future against his present. Or, perhaps, a man who had done that very thing one too many times and found the payoff wanting.

“What favor?”

“I cannot be certain yet, but nothing that would risk your position.”

His eyes narrowed, his fingers closed tight around the vial, his arm drifted backward, preparing to throw it. She held up her hands, palms out, put on that easy smile she’d been practicing and said, “Nothing untoward. I swear it. But take some time to consider – the vial is my gift to you, regardless of your choice. When you’re satisfied with your research, send for me, and I will bring you something new to puzzle over.”

“I will not–” he began, but she had already slipped out the door, shutting its well-oiled hinges behind her. She paused there, breathing softly, back pressed against the door as she strained the very edge of her hearing. Waiting, Waiting.

A shuffle of feet, the scrape of a stool, the click of the cane.

But no breaking of glass, no tinkle of precious elixir bleeding out onto the floor.

He’d taken her bait. She had now only to wait for the payoff.

Her smile was an easy, natural thing, as she strolled out of the Honding palace.