unbuckled the sword he had been given and let it clatter—unexamined—to the floor. He didn’t even undress but opened the west-facing windows that looked out on the hills and fields, letting in the slightly rural sounds of the distant moors.
A fresh wind set his shirt rippling across his back. It made him smile weakly before he turned and fell face-first into bed, knowing this was only the beginning of a very long week.
CHAPTER 10
The wound goes bad. Sena’s breathing quickens; her heart is racing. Chills and fever come in tides. Her mind shuts down to protect her from the pain.
She remembers night sweats and the constant taste of vomit. They say the bizarre wound is putting Megan to the test.
The Shrdnae Mother comes and goes. Sena hears fragments through the snow of quasiconsciousness. “Septic shock.” “We have to move her.” “She’ll die in transit.” “Get the smell-feast . . .”
Sena wants to scream at them to stop. Let me go! Let me die! But Megan cannot conceive defeat. She rips the stitches out, opens up the wound, intolerant of its insubordination. She fills the cavity with numbers and commands the flesh to mend.
Sena passes from cognition back into the void.
Toward the end of Psh, Sena woke slowly.
Silver hoses hung like jewelry in the air. Black silk enrobed the room. It draped her, fell in valances all around. A ray of diamond-colored light struck her midriff, splashing wetly on the creature making love to her naked waist.
The smell-feast’s corpulent red shape had no head. It looked like a scarlet oyster without a shell except for the tendril-like pseudopodia that clutched her abdomen in a hungry embrace. Its peristalsis was slow and hideously erotic.
The silver hoses were for it, pumping in a warm cocktail of drugs and juice. Mindlessly, it fed on the perpetual flow and exosmotically released its waste slime into her blood. Her circulation coursed through the creature’s digestive tract, adding to its color. It was using her heart to pressurize its intestines, force the piped-in nutrients into receptacles in its gut.
If the hoses were unplugged the slow horror would reverse several of its pumps. It would shift from regulation to suction and turn its insatiable hunger back on her. But the Sisterhood’s iatromathematiques were skilled. The creature’s biorhythm was perfectly controlled. Sena found herself both host and symbiote in the coupling of its stringy arms.
The witches watching her with holomorphic eyes were silent as the smell-feast devoured everything diseased, even the bacteria in her blood. Slowly, over days, the creature filled her with medication it deemed waste, hydrating her with excess water from its food.
Eventually, Megan and one of her iatromathematiques entered the room.
“Shh. Be still.”
With a needle, they introduced a virulent toxin into Sena’s veins. It was poison only for the smell-feast. The creature’s mucus reacted immediately, suturing her veins with a kind of rubber patch, a sealed valve that allowed it to withdraw safely from the pounding pressure of her heart.
No more pain. She must have fallen asleep again.
Megan stood over her with a bundle of scrolls under one arm: glowing, Sena realized, not with happiness but with the euphoria of victory.
“It’s time you had something to do. Time you started preparing.”
“Where am I?”
But Sena recognized the carvings in the walls; the starry fresco smeared eight hundred years ago across the ceiling dome. With the dreamy nocturne playing on the gramophone Sena could be certain they were in parliament.
She sat up, gathering the black silk bedclothes around her. Her head was still foggy and she squinted in the patchy sunlight. “Can I have some water?” Her mouth was dry and she wanted a bath.
“I’ve brought some things for you to study.”
“I’m barely awake.”
Megan flicked her wrist at a young girl in a white smock. “Give her some coffee.”
“Coffee? I want water and a toothbrush.”
Megan scowled. “We know what attacked you in the Highlands of Tue, Sienae. We just don’t understand why. I warned you about the Porch of Sth—”
“The Porch saved my life. I had a binding . . .”
“A binding!” Megan nearly dropped the coffee that the child had moments ago put into her hand. “Sienae, you don’t stitch bindings to the Porch of Sth. You can’t—”
“It saved my life, Mother!”
“I . . . saved your life!” Megan fired. “Ridiculous girl. You’re going to get yourself killed with holomorphy like that.” She took a brisk sip of her coffee. “The Wllin Droul found you, which means you’re a pathetic field agent. But you should be safe