“Iwill teachyouto speak mirané, not a fairy language.”
“The Moon-Eater speaks it, and the Moon-Eater’s friend, and Lyric Aharté, who looks like the Moon-Eater.”
Iriset’s lips fall open. Mirané brown, crater red. They always said the miran were created in Aharté’s image, but she supposes it makes sense if the Moon-Eater is the same. Huh.
Eliri escorts Iriset to the bathing room, but Iriset only relieves herself, feeling surprisingly clean. An attendant in violet skirt and tunic withcute little fans tucked into her braids says, “Lyric Aharté bathed, fed, held, stayed with wife for two days.”
Iriset is so surprised she forgets to ask about this “Lyric Aharté” business. But Eliri sends the attendant with a message for the Moon-Eater and his friend god that Iriset is awake and will be with Eliri. There is food waiting when they return to the bedroom, light soup and gentle bread and some flaky fish. Despite her impatience, Iriset eats carefully, offering the designer bread and fish, too. They share the sweet coffee-like drink made with chicory root and honey.
It takes forever to get to Eliri’s lab not only because Iriset feels like her bones turned into rubber and since she’s eaten she’s tired again, but because Iriset keeps stopping to touch things and ask questions about the design work. Eliri tells her some shallow theoretical answers, but admits she specializes in human design not construction design—which of course Iriset is delighted to hear. They trade Old Sarenpet and mirané words, which works well to distract Iriset from the buzz of tangled forces setting her teeth on edge. (She will not let herself remember trading language with Singix, who is dead, or Ambassador Erxan, whom she killed.) Eliri explains that she is from Rivermouth fortress but has worked for the Moon-Eater here nearly six years. The Moon-Eater loves design and allows Eliri almost free rein.
“We call them numena,” Iriset says, wondering if it’s true that the Moon-Eater was never a god at all, but just like her numen.
Eliri’s lab is three stories at the top of a thin tower, and they get to it via a mechanism that lifts them up through the central pillar! Iriset can feel the pull of the rising force stripping away the tangled force-noise as the platform moves upward in a slow spiral—tracks with wheels, Eliri explains, activated by a constructive design to negate falling and promote rising with something she calls a perpendicular force array. If Iriset weren’t so curious about what’s going on in her own body and partial to apostasy, she might’ve insisted on pullingapart the array right there until she understood how it was done. (Negating falling force is something she’s wondered about for years, hoping it was part of a key to recreating the tensile web flight of little spiders.)
The diagnostic table in Eliri’s lab is on the lowest of her levels, a disappointingly plain room built of solid wood with a thick but soft resin covering that she can see the remnants of design carved into—a genius idea for a workroom—and two beams crossing wall-to-wall about an arm-span from the ceiling. Bolts that appear to be silver or steel punctuate the resin walls in even lines, and Iriset has no clue as to their purpose but could come up with some things!
In the center is a long table at waist height, and Eliri pats it before kneeling to press something in the wall. A panel opens to reveal multiple drawers, and Iriset stares as Eliri withdraws a stylus and vellum and a contraption that looks like a rose cactus made of glass. “Up,” Eliri says, and Iriset obeys.
“Clothes on?” she asks, and Eliri nods.
Iriset lays herself out on her back, and Eliri taps her claws to the corner of the table. Threads of force shoot up, and the Adept Hand uses her crystal claws to pinch and move them into arches across Iriset’s body. Once four force-arches cover her, at face, chest, hips, and ankles, Eliri efficiently draws multiple lines of force between each in an octagonal nautilus pattern using the stylus, then activates it.
Forces zap themselves into place, glimmering golden against the air, and Iriset can taste the flavor of them when she laughs. Ecstatic and flow dominate, but falling and rising have their places, too. Iriset desperately wants to learn to use the table.
“How am I, Adept Hand?” she asks.
Eliri ignores the question as she pulls the diagnostic mesh tighter and tighter against Iriset’s body, poking at it until she creates a swirl like an eye just where the dart bit hard into Iriset’s ribs. Then she links the diagnostic mesh to the glass cactus and manipulates severalof its petals. A map of Iriset’s body appears in the air above the rose, as if threads were sketched on an invisible surface. Iriset holds back a squeal by literally biting her lips together. This would have made curing her mother’s apostatical cancer so much simpler.
“No sign of deterioration, no sign of infection,” Eliri says. “The surgeon is good. This Hand will encourage a sweep for the mesh to detect anything unusual, though it might malfunction because of the excessive fraying.”
“What does that mean?” Iriset cranes her neck to look down her body at the shimmer of the mesh.
“The evaporation of inner design. Does Iriset know it?”
“No,” Iriset says, horrified at both the thought and her own ignorance.
“A natural occurrence,” Eliri says, focus on the mesh as she tugs at a few thin lines with her claws, holding steady as she loops another thread with the stylus. “Energy transforms—like life and death, but more mundane usually—between states like water and ice, or between rising and falling.”
Iriset nods, though Eliri doesn’t seem to notice.
“Evaporation is also the name for the energy unused during a body’s natural transformations. Food to fuel, for example. It is body heat, it is excess breath, gas, a byproduct of internal design work. It should be smooth, if a design functions as intended. Iriset’s evaporation has frayed ends, jagged tendrils in and out, where the excess does not know what to be.”
“Can it be healed?”
“It will heal itself. No excess work, no more blowback, and Iriset will be…”
Eliri trails off and Iriset waits, but the designer is picking apart threads of the mesh over Iriset’s lower abdomen. “…fine,” she finally finishes. “Iriset, rest. The sweep may take time. Need anything?”
“No,” Iriset murmurs, closing her eyes. Rest sounds very good,even without a pillow. The tingle of the diagnostic mesh seems to embrace her, and Iriset likes it. She drifts to sleep thinking she should be more interrogatory about this whole time-travel thing.
When Iriset wakes again, she aches with a weariness of long hard work, and there’s a persistent gloop of nausea in her stomach that might be starvation again. She’s been working too hard for her body to keep up. Maybe she can get Shahd to—
Wait. Iriset’s eyes fling open as she recalls the reason she’s reclined on a hard table and tingling from the effects of a force-array blanket wrapped over her.
She sits up, ruining the array—no, it’s a diagnostic mesh. She swipes at the threads of force. They stick weirdly to her fingers before dissipating.
“Sunderer,” says the numen, suddenly at her side. A cold arm around her shoulders helps prop her up. The mesh fully disintegrates.
