e’s never merged fields with anybody. It’s like waking up for the first time in this body, all over again – a press of sensations from all angles, everything at once, except now, he can feel it; he can differentiate. It’s not, at first, anything but a cacophony of impressions, of colors he can hear and smells he can taste, of the mona’s will just out of sight, so heavy on his tongue it almost calls to mind a verse of monite. His hammering sober head feels as if it will explode.
Sensations translate themselves. His mind adjusts, as it did once; it makes itself alien to him once again. He didn’t have the space or the learning to wonder then how much of it’s his mind and how much of it’s – his, how much wiring got left over when he slid his way into the skull. He knows that he’s never felt this before; it’s like suddenly, and against your will, understanding a language you’ve never heard in your life. Only it’s not a language as men speak with their tongues, and he’s helpless to its tide.
He can taste blood in his mouth suddenly, or at least, that’s what the shift of Shrikeweed’s field is telling him; it’s a sort of redshift that tastes like blood. If it’s sigiled, it’s warm like a pounding heart. He can’t tell if it’s anger; it doesn’t feel like anger, not exactly. It feels like anger and wanting, all at once.
His eyes are shut, because he doesn’t think he can bear to open them and see the whiskered clerk across the table. There’s something almost painful about it, this redshift, but it’s not a bad sort of pain.
He wants, suddenly, to fill himself to the brim with it. He wants to swing his fists. He misses it. His own field is sigiled; he only knows this because he feels the heat in the air around him, and all the hairs on the backs of his arms prickling. He pushes back with a redshift of his own, tinged bitter black.
He wants to swing his old fists, with the strength – the inertia – that used to be behind them. He doesn’t know if he’s lost that inertia, if he’s regained it, if it was never strength in the first place. His field flexes, cracking white hot against Shrikeweed’s. He jerks his chin up, gritting his teeth, and realizes that his fist is tight on the table. He can still taste blood in his teeth, and he feels the wanting worse than anything he’s felt in a year.
Is this what you want? he wants to demand. Are you taunting me?
Shrikeweed’s anger is as organized and dry as his field, but it’s anger, and it’s pleasure, most horribly – familiarly – of all. He feels suddenly as if he is himself again, sitting scarred and crooked-toothed and crooked-nosed and human at the table. He opens his eyes and looks down at the hand on the table, and spreads its fingers against the dark wood, shaking.
His stomach lurches. The anger mixes with fear in his field; it all spills out into the mingling mona, static and clairvoyant, trapped-animal trapped-man-in–this. He breathes in sharply before he breathes himself indectal, counting four, and only then does he realize that he can hear the curl of a spell on Shrikeweed’s tongue, through the roaring in his ears.
What the hell did you cast? he wants to demand. He stays himself, because the civil servant speaks again.
If he can do anything, it is mimic; she has taught him this. She has made him this. He has made himself this. It is even easier when he is angry, and he is angry now.
He draws himself up like Prudhomme; his face twists into a fearful expression. “There simply aren’t the resources,” he says, “and we must move carefully; for the love of the Circle” – for the love of the Lady? He screws up his nose; he can’t remember, but he improvises – “I don’t care if Mr. Antonacchi has returned from the Harbor with bells upon his shoes, Verdier, you are playing with fire if you expect… if you expect to court both of these demons at once.”
Hawke, and – who? Hawke and the Order? Azmus? But if Trevisani has Azmus on a leash, then why? Who’s holding all the leashes?
Hold still a while, the Shrike says, and he does. He empties his mind. It isn’t Azmus, is all he has said, he knows. It may have been the High Judge’s idea this time, but it isn’t him at the end of the leash, not all the way down all the leashes.
You know the worst of it, he wants to laugh, suddenly. His peace of mind didn’t last long.
He stops, pressing his lips very thin. “Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says, “if I must drink with you, I – I will.” His lips twist. “Your hands are not bloody,” he breathes finally, spluttering, opening his eyes. He still feels the taste of blood on his tongue, and the rage and delight that are not his. “Who the hell are you?”