his sword and strike her down.
said the voice.
The commands screamed at him to do it, just do it, to cut her down where she stood.
said the voice.
He extended his arm, his hand clutching the hilt, and he reached forward until its tip touched her left breast.
His commands screamed at him to drive it in, to run her through, to kill her now and fulfill his bindings.
The girl stared into his eyes, her gaze calm and steady.
Why isn’t she running?
But then he realized.
She isn’t running, he thought, because she is me. And she knows I am not going to do this.
He blinked.
And then, ignoring the commands howling and shrieking in his mind, he opened his fingers, and let the sword fall from his grasp.
The bloody rapier clattered to the ground.
The girl held his gaze, her hand still extended to him. Then he reached forward with his bloody hand, grasped her palm, and squeezed it tight.
The commands went silent in his mind, truly and utterly silent like they never had before.
They were gone.
They were gone, and he was not this thing anymore. He was something new.
He burst into tears.
Berenice knelt and embraced him, her arms tight around his heaving shoulders. And she wept, too, for she knew what he had done. She understood it, for to her it felt as if she had done the same, and she did not condemn him. She just grieved.
“My mother!” he cried. “My mother, my mother, my mother!”
“I know,” she whispered, holding him tight. “I know, I know, I know.”
From the corner of the room, he heard Valeria’s voice say: “I must admit, I…am reluctantly impressed…”
For a moment he simply sobbed, unable to control himself. But then he felt his own thoughts coil about and join with Berenice’s and Sancia’s, their experiences and wills and memories entangling with his own, and he realized the night was far from over.
he said.
they said.
He sat back and stared into Berenice’s face, smudged with blood and lacquered with tears, and he looked at himself through her eyes for a second.
He looked different. No longer a warrior, a paladin, a grand defender of the helpless. Now he looked, he rather thought, like a free man.
He stood, picked up the body of his mother, and gently laid her in the corner of the ballroom. Then he knelt, gently kissed her on the brow, and stood back up. “Let’s get to work,” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Berenice. She set a wooden box down on the floor, took out the imperiat, pressed its button, and placed it inside. “But first, let’s make sure we have enough time to do it.”
* * *
—
Crasedes labored in the depths of the Dandolo foundry, issuing commands to the lexicon at its heart, cajoling and persuading and nudging it along, barking orders to the team of scrivers to amend this or that definition…
And then, finally, he felt the world around him begin to bend, and change.
“Finally,” he said.
A turn of the key, a crack, and he was floating in the air several hundred feet above the foundry.
For a long while, nothing happened: the facility stayed dark and silent and still.
But then, with a faint, uneven fluttering, the lamps of the foundry came back on, one by one.
Crasedes did not truly need to breathe anymore, so he did not sigh with relief—but instinct was a hard thing to get rid of, even after several millennia, and he attempted to do so now.
It’s back up, he thought. He looked out on the city, and watched as the massive wedge of the night sky slowly darkened back to