Wednesday, June 20, 2012

49 - Pretty, Pretty Mal-Spider


In the massive, lonely bed, Diryish’s breath echoed against the stone columns, even and deep. The hive on the balcony wafted warmed air into the Imperial bedchamber with their wings, a soothing murmur like the buzz of the whole city, sleeping. The heavy spring curtains stirred in that breeze and the Emperor, disturbed in his dreams, rolled himself tighter into his silken quilts.

In the Loggia Propolissimus, on the other side, one level below the Sunrise Loggia, Nadian took up the dismantled bits of affinity mandery and disconnected them. A program buried in his bloodcells shut down its un-natural shunt and the drain on his energy ceased.

He drew a deep breath, feeling the weight of before un-noticed pressure release. For a long moment he just sat and panted, leaning his forehead down on his newly cleansed worktable, wondering why the mandery took so much effort. At least he wouldn’t have every female creature even close to Mariush following him about any longer. He’d been starting to wonder about the sex of the flies that haunted him the last few hours before he could escape to his workshop and take the EnLightened thing apart.

Nadian wasn’t used to failing quite so badly and so consistently.  His rise to power had been steady and directly resulting from his mandery. The only thing he’d not managed was to kill the old Emperor himself.  Yet.  But not from lack of trying. 

He managed to drag his head up off the stone table, put a single drop from a specific bottle on his tongue. The honey liquor he spooned into a hotpot of water boiling over a blue alcohol flame. He dropped the spiced tea leaves into the brew and drank the resulting cup down as if it were bitter gall. It gave him enough energy to try again.

He pulled a piece of paper across the desk and began to sketch a mechanism upon it, in the shape of a mal-spider. The finger-long, toxic fangs he drew out in loving lines of black against the white page. The venomous fur stood in spikes and the scorpion-like stinger shone diamond deadly. But the picture he drew was clearly not living. It had joints and wheels inside the pulsing, soft belly. Satisfied, he drew a needle out of his drawer, passed it through flame and alcohol before piercing the soft flesh inside his bottom lip where no one would ever see.

The droplets of blood he caught in a clean inkwell, dipped his pen and, sitting down, began tracing his ugly epitome of poisonous, crawling death all over again, glistening red, clotting fast.

**

In the Emperor’s bedchamber a jewelled black pearl pendant inside the open jewel case, carelessly left open by the Emperor's attendants cracked into three pieces. The central ovoid slid up and clicked into place as if it were a head suspended between the two layered black slivers of fangs. 

Emerald chips from a ring flowed like water onto the forming creature, an eyecluster on the head. A necklace unlinked itself, the gold unfolding, melding together into long, thin, nimble legs, each tipped with a diamond claw.

The legs reached up to unscrew the bulb of a perfume bottle, threading themselves through it, raising it up off the dressing table as a headless abdomen, front legs groping blindly for the head before it clicked into place.

Spikes of crystals from a lamp fringe unwound themselves and clattered into place as the stinger, floating particles of glass settling in a glittering fuzz all over the new shape.

All gifts, over the years, from courtiers to the Emperor. Not all from Nadian. Not even all from the Basserus clan, never a whole piece of jewellery, the protections on the Emperor would have destroyed them as he’d picked them up, much less laid them against his vulnerable flesh.

In the bed, the Emperor, in the middle of a dream, muttered and rolled over, flung one arm wide, his head tipped back.  The soft spot pulsed just above the armour of his ribs, open to a mal-spider made of gems and gold.

On the dressing table, the spider rose to its diamond-tipped legs and with a soft, glittering sound the stinger flashed out and dipped itself into the open perfume bottle.  It’s now pulsing abdomen had once forced the scent out in delicate droplets misting the skin’s barrier. The diamond end flashed again into the heart of a flower in a bouquet on the dressing table, the two liquids mingling into an innocently clear fluid on the tip.

**

“Lovely spiderling.” Nadian said softly, running his tongue gingerly over the lacerated tissue inside his lip. He needed only a drop more to command the work and send it jumping from table top to chair to floor, clattering lightly as rice grains on the stone floor.

He wished he could see the actual strike, the gemmed spider climbing up the silken curtains onto the bed, seeking out the heartbeat, the heat of the sleeping body. The lightning strike into an ear or neck under the ear, or corner of the eye. And the Empire would no longer belong to that stiffening old corpse that refused to give up and let itself be buried, but to him.

Nadian was sure of it. No one had the power he did. If the vizier thought to challenge him, he’d be dead a heartbeat later, since the military men would not obey. General d’Molfe was in place to take over should there be enough chaos when the old man was found dead in the morning, smelling of nothing but the flowers in his room and his own perfume... and death, of course... no one would see such a tiny puncture wound.

He actually winced this final time, drew the last drop of blood, and began outlining the command word he’d written on the mal-spider’s body. “Go. Kill the old man. Open that door for me, beautiful little spider.”

No comments:

Post a Comment