The Dragon’s Eye

Emily pounded on the door, assuming it would do no good, but finding the act of pounding very satisfying indeed. After a moment, however, the handle turned. Emily stepped back as the door opened, praying that it wasn’t Stanton. But it wasn’t. Outside of the door stood Rose, flanked by two guards in Institute gray.

“Let me out of here!” Emily said.

“You’ve had your chance,” Rose snarled at her. “He’s got important business to attend to. He’ll send for you when he’s ready.” She put a distasteful emphasis on the word “you,” as if even the idea of Emily tasted bad.

“You can’t keep me a prisoner here,” Emily said. “You want me to go, I want to go. Now get out of my way.”

“You deserve to be a prisoner!” Rose’s mouth was tight with anger. “He should throw you into a pit and forget he ever met you. You’re mean and deceitful and cruel, and I know for a fact that you never gave him my card!”

“Rose,” Emily groaned. “Please.”

“It was a very special token,” Rose said. “Intended to convey my deepest admiration and respect. And yes, if you must know, I signed it ‘with love’ … something you’d know nothing about!”

“Rose, honestly, you can have him.” Emily bit the words. “Take him with my blessing. Just let me the hell out of this room.”

With a strangled cry, Rose slammed the door hard, and once again came the sound of a key scraping a lock—a sound Emily knew so well by now.

She whirled savagely. With a high-pitched scream, she picked up a delicate chair and hurled it at the door, just to hear it smash.

Then she stormed over to the window, threw the casements open, and climbed up to kneel on the padded window seat. She looked down. It was a long sheer drop to the ground. She suddenly felt terribly certain that it had been planned this way from the beginning, and that giving her this room had been a very conscious choice.

Emily leaned a hot forehead against the stone frame of the window and watched the leaves of the ivy fluttering in the gathering evening breeze. They shone in the setting sun. There was the touch of a gentle hand on her shoulder. She startled, then looked back slowly.

But it was not a hand. It was a tendril of the thick English ivy that blanketed the Institute’s exterior wall. Emily pulled back in surprise as the tendril slithered down across her chest and down around her waist. She tried to pull it off of her, but it grasped her tightly, pulling her out of the window. She screamed in surprise and protest, her voice hoarse from all the screaming she’d done previously, but more thick vines came up, pulling themselves away from the wall, their suckers making popping sounds as they released from the stone. Emily felt vines snaking around her ankles, around her knees, around her waist … she was being pulled out of the window, toward the sheer drop.

But more tendrils of ivy wrapped themselves around her, and she realized that she was being borne out of the window on gentle verdant hands. They conveyed her slowly down the wall, toward the ground below. Leaves and rough stalks tickled her skin as they passed her down, higher vines releasing as lower vines tightened. And then she was on the ground, the good soft ground through which she could feel Ososolyeh thrumming up. She was on the verge of sinking to her hands and knees in sheer gratitude for the closeness, but she saw students inside a classroom rush to a window; some pointed and called. She started running. If the lowest of the Institute’s cultors knew that she’d escaped, Stanton would know soon. And he would come for her. She fled to the conservatory.

Inside the hothouse it was as warm as she remembered it. She recalled how Emeritus Zeno had led them along these crushed walnut paths, showing off his orchids like favorite grandchildren. The orchid he had been most proud of was the huge Dragon’s Eye orchid, with its stinking flowers of chocolate brown and chartreuse. Its roots reached far down, to where soil met bedrock and water.

Kneeling quickly, she placed her hands on the orchid’s thick, woody vine, closing her eyes.

Ah, something greeted her. Emily, isn’t it?

Emily relaxed, letting her body slump against the vine, letting her consciousness reach into it.

“Emeritus Zeno,” she breathed.

Is that my name? Oh well. If you say so.

“I saw you die.”

Emily felt Zeno’s consciousness spreading through the orchid, suffusing it, becoming thinner and less human with each tendril he curled into. She had to hurry.

I made it home. Zeno’s spirit breathed satisfaction and relief. I went through a root, then another root, and another. I lost my way a few times. Several times. But I went through another and another and another and another …

“You have to tell me how to find the Temple,” Emily asked, trying to hold on to him, trying to pull his mind back together. “The Temple where you died. We have to get there, stop temamauhti …”

Who are you, again?

Her fear stoked a sudden rage. He hadn’t come all this way just to melt into an orchid. He was Benedictus Zeno, father of modern credomancy, a roil of calculation. He just had to remember. She had to make him remember. Taking a deep growling breath, she gathered the power of Ososolyeh within herself. Closing her eyes, she reached her spirit into the orchid and shook the old man, seizing every diffuse piece of him. It was like rattling a box of marbles.

Damn it, she snarled silently. You came back for a reason. Her sudden anger shuddered through the whole earth. You must tell me.

Zeno’s mind, suddenly clear, said, My goddess. Mat’ syra zemliya …

Tell me, Emily thundered again.

I thought he was just a failed Initiate. Something we could use. We even had a plan to get him into the Temple. After the Symposium, he was to find the High Priest, crawl before him, beg to be taken back in exchange for something of great value …

Emily tightened her grasp on Zeno’s spirit; the effort of clarity seemed to make him weaker by the second.

But then, in her lair of despair and pain … such a cold, cold place … she showed me the horrible truth. The horrible truth of what he was … what he is. And then I knew. I knew how to get the desperatus into the Temple.

How? Emily shrieked the words in her mind. How can we find it?

He doesn’t have to find the Temple, my Goddess, Zeno said. The Temple will find him.

And then, Zeno did not speak anymore, just spread out thinner and thinner, his spirit becoming flowers, becoming small chambered fruits, becoming tendrils. His mind filled with nothing but thoughts of blooms, luscious and meaty.

Emily removed her hands from the orchid’s vine and fell backward. She smelled earth all around her. She felt Ososolyeh moving in her mind. She did not even need to tumble toward it, or allow her mind to expand—the consciousness was just there. It was part of her, like breathing in and out. She stopped looking for answers. She stopped asking questions. She just lay there, breathing in and out, as the vision unfolded in her mind:

Emily didn’t open her eyes. Just kept breathing, in and out.

That was how the Goddess purified Black Exunge. That was how she intended to marshal the vast amounts of power she needed. That unnatural mound of flesh was the engine that would power the remaking …

Emily felt someone bending over her, but it took her a moment to remember that she had human eyes, and that she should open them and look through them.

The someone bending over her was a young man. He looked like a standard-issue Institute student, black-suited and fresh-faced, but he had a strange bruise on the center of his forehead. He wore a blood-red tie affixed with an obsidian stickpin. In his hand, he clutched a sangrimancer’s alembic.

“Miss Jesczenka’s lover,” she whispered, not sure if he was a vision or if he was real. He was the boy she’d seen Miss Jesczenka with the night of the Investment. And she had seen him somewhere else, too. “Lieutenant Stickpin.”

“Lover?” He snorted, his voice cracking. He looked past Emily, down one of the gravel paths. “Did you hear that, Mother?” he called, his tone bitter and mocking. “I can’t imagine where she got such a disgusting idea.” Following his gaze, Emily saw that the words were directed to a motionless female form. A woman’s body was laid across the path, the front of her dress bright with blood. It was Miss Jesczenka. “Of course, I use the term ‘mother’ in the loosest possible sense,” he continued conversationally. “More important, she’s my key to the Institute. Not an easy one to use—she’s awfully damn canny—but she got me in to plant the Nikifuryevich Ladder. And she got me to you.” He paused, and at that moment she saw the knife of black glass in his hand, glittering in the gathering darkness of night. “You’d think a Witch, of all people, would know better than to abandon her own blood, leave it to wander the world anonymous and unattended.”

“Anonymous.” Emily remembered Miss Jesczenka’s words. “Utisz.”

“Better than Stickpin, anyway,” the lieutenant sneered, bringing up the knife. Emily raised a hand to defend herself, but he knocked it aside easily, pinned it to her side.

“I hear your fiancé’s looking to find my divine mistress,” he said, as she struggled beneath him. “As it happens, she’s looking for him, too. Let’s give him a trail to follow, shall we?”

Then, with one brutal swipe, he slashed the knife across Emily’s throat. Pain burned through her, and warm wetness gushed down from her throat to her chest. Her hand flew up to the wound, fumbled along the edges of sliced flesh, her fingers drowning in hot stickiness. She felt the vein throbbing beneath her clutching fingers, pumping her life out in gouting bursts with every beat of her hammering heart.

Utisz placed his hand over hers, let her spurting blood coat it. The bruise on his forehead glowed. He threw back his head, closed his eyes, bared his teeth, and screamed one word—a word that spun the world in a hurricane around them, dissolving reality into fragments that lashed Emily’s skin like pellets of ice in a winter snowstorm.

“Itztlacoliuhqui!” he roared. The sound throbbed in her ears like the beating of her own slowing heart, and they were gone.