“I’m not interfering.” In slow movements, I took his journal, surprised that he was allowing this intrusion. “I’m only asking questions, to better understand.” I leafed through the drawings, swallowing past the lump in my throat. One spread of pages contained a detailed leg, the page nearly black with the density of written notes. In growing horror, I kept turning pages, but no other body parts presented themselves. Only a slim wand, like something an Elder might carry, with a handle molded for gripping fingers.
“An arm and a leg. That’s what it will cost.” I closed the book, not wanting to look at him as he was now, intact. “That sounds like a joke they’d tell in a tavern.”
“Fair payment, given the results.” The sorcerer was gentle as he retrieved the book. “Hydna will pay the rest. She won’t drain herself, not like I did, but it will be close.”
“Too damn close for my liking.” She spoke with her mouthfull. “And those limbs will stop working with the magic gone. You’ll need to think about that. If we fish around the mummy piles, there’s bound to be pre-Descent folk with mechanized prosthetics—we can yank them off, duplicate, and adjust.”
“We won’thaveour current forms after the infection is cleansed, so it will not matter.” Merulo was clearly rehashing an old argument. Finished with his notes, he took my abandoned apple and began to devour it, smearing his chin with scraps of its flesh.
I recalled what he had told me about dragons, what they had been, pre-Descent. “You’ll be electronics?”
“Computers,” corrected Hydna, reclining with a belch. “Super-computers. They’re like . . . thinking boxes, made of pre-Descent materials. I’m not overly keen on the idea, but who knows, might be fun.”
Her words were punctuated by the splatter of an apple core, which Merulo had thrown to bounce along the plaza tiles. “You’re keen enough on the rest of it,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand.
“What if you kept your bodies?” I asked. Then, quickly, as the sorcerer’s face soured: “I’m not interfering, only asking. But . . . do you have to?”
“Dragon bodies are raw magic.” Merulo’s bony fingers descended on a fresh apple. “The transformation is a necessity. Everything will be restored, cleared of God’s corruption.”
“Ah.” I wondered what would happen to the leviathans, with their beautiful draping fins. “So that’s that, then.”
A faint, treasonous hope remained in me, that the conditions of the prophecy had been met. That the mad sorcerer was defeated and would never see the world he sought.Even if he mutilated himself in a failed attempt to destroy all magic—it beat outright death, or whatever loss of self that transformation might entail. We could live like that, Merulo on his prosthetics, with his fading dreams.
Though—and here I snuck a sly glance at my sorcerer, who had a fleck of apple flesh caught in a scowl line—with my powers ofpersuasion, he might even be stopped before that point. Which, you know, would be preferable.
CHAPTER 36
In Which Hydna Has Taken Me on Another Wandering, Shouting Tour and Has Thoroughly Depleted Me of All Bodily Energy. In Which My Limbs Are Something Akin to Undercooked Bread, In Which My Brain Has the Exhausted Inflexibility of Overcooked Bread, and In Which, Finally, I Am Hoping to Rest and Regain a Resemblance to Normal Bread.
Icould tell night had fallen, as the rippling sunlight had tapered to black, leaving a dome of ink above me. I could also tell because I was yawning.
In my stumbling journey back to the inn, I rubbed at my eyes, repeatedly, and thus nearly tripped over the pile stacked before our bedroom door.
It contained, neatly parceled: my sword, my awful corpse clothing, the various baubles I’d picked off the ground, and some cleaning supplies I’d begged off Hydna.
“Uh . . . Merulo?” I gathered my belongings in one arm, and with some trepidation, opened the door.
At first, I thought a mummified animal had been left on our bed as a macabre gift. Then I recognized the sorcerer. Helay facing the wall, so that all I saw was black cloak and bony shoulders.
I took slow, tentative steps into the room, floorboards creaking. “Merulo?”
“Do not think,” he drawled without turning, “that, absent an eye, I am blind. Hydna is a charming individual—”
“Hm,” I said.
“And a healthy one.” His shoulders curled. “I’m sure her strength and stamina are not without appeal—”
“Hey! Your stamina is fine.”
“And you do lie,” he concluded. “You lie to me, and you lie to others. Constantly. Do not try to deny it, for that itself will be a lie. You are not isolated with me anymore. You no longer have to act in . . . in certain ways, in the hopes that I will save you. She has not hurt you, she has not been cruel to you, and so if you like her—”
“Merulo,” I said flatly. “She would crush my pelvis to dust. Can I put my stuff back now?”
“It is my preference that you leave.”
“I already left once, and we saw how that turned out.” I regretted this immediately as the form on the bed flinched.
Hesitantly, not sure what else to say, I tucked my clothes into a drawer, leaned my sword against a wall, and returned the baubles to the places I’d deemed decoratively fitting. I set a blown-glass fish beside a lamp to better catch the light. A rearing unicorn (which, bizarrely, lacked a horn), found its home on our dresser. My plastic shell-mirror, I set on the bedside table, so that I might examine myself in the mornings.
