for sustenance and found nothing.
I will fix my eyes, she thought. I will master this thing.
She picked the scalpel back up, made sure her bowl and rags were ready. Carefully, carefully, she began to cut into her eye.
She felt the blades touch her cornea, slide into it at an angle. The clear coat flopped up, granting access to the lens. Her movements were subtle, careful. She whispered as she went, using tiny bleeding capillaries to work the Unknown Tongue. She crafted facets with the double knife, cut inscriptions that would have made a miniaturist gape. There were numbers. There were shapes. Angles and circles and tiny triangles engraved on multiple layers of cornea. She cut her eye into thin sheets of film, put diagrams on various strata, sandwiched them together, compressed them.
She dabbed at her tears. An endless gush of fluid poured across her face. Finally she was done.
Now . . . the other eye.
After several more hours, throbbing in pain, she slipped the mask over her head. It was dark but the Inti’Drou glyphs still floundered in her brain. She concentrated on something simple, something capable of restoring her identity. She thought of Caliph and the way Prince Mortiman had looked at him.
Sena woke up blind. She could feel the mask working on the swelling. Like a smell-feast, the shylock was actually a more docile cousin of the scarlet horror. It was brown, silent and sleepy. It could be cut and sewn like a sheet of leather in order to fashion gloves or boots. This one had been hibernating in her pack for two years. She felt its gentle suction on her swollen eyes.
She fumbled for the bed. Caliph’s side was still made, pillow undisturbed beneath the quilt. “Caliph?”
She was seeing things, bits of light that could not be light. The shylock kept her in darkness. Am I hallucinating?
She got up. She could tell where the fireplace was. She could see it, snagged against the wall like a tuft of cotton in a thicket. It moved. It was ephemeral. Its shadows seemed to breathe. The room swayed as if underwater. Sena stumbled and fell. She felt blood trickle down her cheek.
“Godsfire!” Her head hurt. Her bladder was going to explode. “Caliph?” Bluish impressions tracked across her cerebellum from the right. She turned as if toward a light, smacked her forehead on the bed. “Yella byn! Fuck!” She reached out, touched the wooden pillar, groped past it, trying to make sense of what she interpreted as sight. She tried to shut her eyes then cursed at her stupidity. She couldn’t close her mind against the impressions even with the shylock clinging to her face. “Mother of Mizraim I have to pee!”
The shylock left its presence in her blood and forced her kidneys to work overtime. She wondered how long she had been asleep. I can’t make it! She thought of the agonizing walk to the toilet.
Pastel colors rinsed her brain. She could see the bank of windows in Caliph’s bedroom. She reached out, walked toward them, uncertain they were real.
One of the panes swung in and folded against the wall admitting a chilly mass of air, fresh with rural smells.
She undid her belt.
The ledge beyond the room was wide and deep and draped in cool blue. Diamonds of gold sparkled on the tower’s skin as the sunlight crept east, dragging over rough stones, catching every chink and mortar line. The colors were bizarre. Too saturated. Too bright.
Below the castle wall, architecture snarled and stirred as part of some remote world seen through veils of dream. Her pants unsnapped on either leg and crumpled to the floor in leather folds. Thin metallic sounds and indistinct voices curled out of the Hold. Her mind bucked again at the realization that she was not seeing anything. What if I fall?
She climbed out onto the ledge, clothed only from the waist up and the knees down. She set her boots several feet apart and leaned back on her palms. Like one of the grotesques on Hullmallow Cathedral, she perched at the brink of disaster.
The cool air felt delicious; it mouthed her vulva and sent a tingle through her. She relaxed and allowed herself to foul the sky. Her boots grated. She moved backward on her palms, withdrawing into the room. She resnapped her pants, found the basin, washed and sat down.
She was dizzy. She thought about taking the shylock off but reconsidered. Although she wanted to try her new eyes on the Csrym T,