Текст книги "Incarceron"

Автор книги: Kathryn Fisher

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24

Do you seek the key to Incarceron?

Look inside yourself. It has always been hidden there.

– The Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique

The Sapient's tower was odd, Finn thought. He and Keiro and Attia had taken the man at his word, and spent the day exploring all over it, and there were things about it that puzzled them.

"The food, for instance." Keiro picked a small green fruit from the bowl and sniffed it cautiously. "This is grown, but where? We re miles in the sky and there's no way down.

Don't tell me he takes his silver ship to market."

They knew there was no way down because the basement rooms where the beds were had been built on the bare rock. Small stalagmites rose up between the furniture, icicles of calcium hung from the ceiling, sediments laid down over the century and a half of the

Prison's life, though Finn had thought it took longer, millennia even, for such things to form.

As he wandered behind Attia from kitchen to storeroom to observatory he let himself slip for a moment into a daydream of fascinating horror; that Incarceron was indeed a world, ancient and alive, that he was a microscopic creature inside it, tiny as a bacterium, and that

Claudia too was here, that even Sapphique was a dream dreamed by Prisoners who could not face the dread of there being no Escape.

"And then the books!" Keiro thrust the door to the library open and gazed at them all in disgust. "Who needs so many books? Who could ever be bothered to read them?"

Finn moved past him. Keiro could hardly read his own name, and was proud of it. He had once gotten into a fight about some supposed insult about him scribbled on a wall by one of Jormanric's bullies; Keiro had come out of the fight alive but badly beaten. Finn remembered being unable to tell him that the graffiti was harmless, even grudgingly admiring.

Finn could read. He had no idea who taught him, but he could read even better than

Gildas, who muttered the words half aloud and had only seen about a dozen books in his life. The Sapient was here now, sitting at the desk in the library's heart, his knobbly hands turning the pages of a great codex bound in leather, his eyes close to the handwritten text.

Around him, on shelves that reached to the shadowy ceiling, Blaize's library was immense, towers of heavy volumes all numbered in gold and bound in green and maroon.

Gildas raised his head. They had expected him to be in awe, but his voice was acid.

"Books? There are no books here, boy."

Keiro snorted. "Your eyes are worse than you think."

Impatiently, the old man shook his head. "These are useless.

Look at them. Names, numbers. They tell us nothing."

Attia took a book from the nearest shelf and opened it, and Finn looked over her shoulder. It was thick with dust, and the edges of the pages were eaten away, so dry they fell into flakes. On the page was a list of names:

MARCION

MASCUS

MASCUS ATTOR

MATTHEUS PRIME

MATTHEUS UMRA each followed by a number. A long, eight-digit number. "Prisoners?" Finn said.

"Apparently. Lists of names. Volumes of them. For every Wing, every Level, going back centuries."

Beside each name was a small square image of a face. Attia touched one and almost dropped the book. Finn gave a gasp, which brought Keiro over to the table, kneeling up behind them.

"Well, well," he said.

For each name a series of images blinked rapidly over the page, appearing and disappearing in quick succession, until Attia touched one with her small fingertip and it froze, opening into a full-length picture of a hunchbacked man in a yellow coat that filled the page. When she let go, the pictures rippled again, hundreds of images of the same man, in a street, traveling, talking by a fire, asleep, his whole life catalogued there, his body growing gradually older before their eyes, bending, on a stick now, begging, leprous with some terrible sickness. And then nothing.

Finn said quietly, "The Eyes. They must record as well as watch."

"So how has this Blaize got all this?" Keiro raised his head in sudden shock. "Do you think I'm in here?" Without waiting for an answer he crossed to the shelf marked found a long ladder, and set it against the books, climbing easily up. He began to take the books out and shove them back, impatient.

Attia had crossed to the A section and Gildas was busy reading, so Finn found the letter

F and looked for himself.

FIMENON

FIMMA

FIMMIA

FIMOS NEPOS

FINARA

His fingers shook as he turned the page, tracing down until he found it. FINN

He stared at it. There were sixteen Finns, but his was the last. The number was there, in all its black familiarity, the number that had been on his overalls in the cell, that he had learned by heart. Next to it was a small image, two triangles superimposed, one of them inverted. A star. Feeling almost sick with anxiety, he touched it.

Images rippled. Himself crawling in the white tunnel. He stopped it instantly.

There he was, looking younger, cleaner, his face a mask of fear and tearful determination.

It hurt him to look at it. He tried to turn back, but this was the first image; there was nothing before.

Nothing.

His heart thudded. He scrolled on slowly.

He and Keiro. Images of the Comitatus. Himself fighting, eating, sleeping. Once, laughing. Growing, changing. Losing something. He almost thought he could see it going, the ever-changing images showing himself becoming someone harder, watchful, scowling, always there in the background of Keiro's quarrels and schemes. One image showed him in a fit, and he gazed in horrified disgust at his curled, convulsed body, his contorted face. Quickly he let the pictures run on, almost too fast to see, until he jabbed down and held them still.

The ambush.

He saw himself frozen, half out of the chains, grabbing the Maestra's arm. She must have just realized what a trap she was in; her face was caught in a strange, hurt, almost bruised look, her smile already stiffening.

If there was more he didn't want to see it.

He slapped the book shut, the sound loud in the silent room, making Gildas grunt and

Attia look over.

"Find anything?" she said.

He shrugged. "Nothing I didn't know. What about you?" He noticed she had left the A section and was up among the C's. "Why there?"

"What Blaize said about no Outside. I thought I'd look up Claudia."

He went cold. "And?"

She was holding the book, a big green volume. She closed it quickly and turned, shoving it back into the shelf. "Nothing. He's wrong. She's not in Incarceron."

There was something subdued about her voice, but before he could think about it Keiro's hiss of wrath jerked him around.

"He's got everything about me in here! Everything!"

Finn knew that Keiro had been orphaned as a baby and had grown up in the gang of filthy urchins that always seemed to be hanging around the Comitatus; warriors' by-blows, children of women they'd killed, kids who nobody knew. It would have been a tooth-andnail struggle to eat and survive and keep a face as unmarked as Keiro's in that ferocious rabble. Maybe that was why his oathbrother looked so alarmed. He too closed the book with a clap.

"Forget your petty histories." Gildas looked up, his sharp face lit. "Come and read a real book. This is the journal of one Lord Calliston, the one they called the Steel Wolf. He is said to have been the first Prisoner." He turned a page. "It's all here, the Coming of the

Sapienti, the first convicts, the establishment of the New Order. They seem to have been relatively few, and they spoke to the Prison in those days as they spoke to each other."

Now he did sound awed.

They crowded around and saw that the book was smaller than the others and the text truly handwritten, with some scratchy pen. Gildas tapped the page. "The girl was right. They set the Prison up as a place to dump all their problems, but there was a definite hope of creating a perfect society. According to this we should have all been serene philosophers long ago. Look here."

He read aloud, in his rasping voice.

"Everything was prepared for, every eventuality covered. We have nutritious food, free education, medical care better than Outside, now that the Protocol rules there. We have the discipline of the Prison, that invisible being that watches and punishes and rules.

"And yet.

"Things decay. Dissident groups are forming; territory is disputed. Marriages and feuds develop. Already two Sapienti have led their followers away to live in isolation, claiming they fear the murderers and thieves will never change, that a man has been killed, a child attacked. Last week two men came to blows over a woman. The Prison intervened. Since then neither of them has been seen.

"I believe they are dead and that Incarceron has integrated them into its systems.

There was no provision for the death penalty, but the Prison is in charge now. It is thinking for itself"

In the silence Keiro said, "Did they really think it would work?"

After a moment Gildas turned the page. The whisper was loud in the stillness. "It seems so. He is not clear about what went wrong. Perhaps some unplanned element entered and tipped the balance, by just a remark, a small act, so that the flaw in their perfect ecosystem gradually grew and destroyed it. Perhaps Incarceron itself malfunctioned, became a tyrant– that certainly happened, but was it cause or effect? And then there's this."

He pointed out the words as he read them, and Finn, leaning forward, saw that they were underlined, the page grubby, as if someone else had fingered them over and over.

"... or is it that man contains within himself the seeds of evil? That even if he is placed in a paradise perfectly formed for him he will poison it, slowly, with his own jealousies and desires? I fear it may be that we blame the Prison for our own corruption. And I do not except myself, for I too am one who has killed and looked only to my own gain."

In the vast silent room only motes of dust fell through the slant of light from the roof.

Gildas closed the book. He looked up at Finn and his face was gray. "We shouldn't stay here," he said heavily. "This is a place where dust gathers and doubt enters the heart. We should go, Finn. This is not a refuge. It's a trap."

A footstep in dust made them look up. Blaize stood on the gallery that circled the skylight, gazing down at them, his hands tight on the rail.

"You need rest," he said calmly. "Besides, there is no way down from here. Until I decide to take you."

CLAUDIA HAD been meticulous; scanners pre-placed in all the cellars, holo-images of herself and Jared sleeping peacefully in their beds, a hefty bribe to the under-steward to learn the duration of the debate, the number of clauses in the marriage treaty, the time it would all take.

Finally she had seen Evian and told him to argue about anything. As long as her father remained in the Great Chamber until well past midnight.

Slipping between the casks and barrels in her dark clothes, she felt like a shadow released from the endless banquet upstairs, the polite banter, the Queen's red-lipped cloying intimacies, the way she clutched at Claudia's hand and held it so tightly, thrilling herself with how they would be so happy, the palaces they would build, the hunts, the dances, the dresses. Caspar had glowered at her, drinking too much wine and escaping as soon as he could to meet some serving girl. And her father, grave and poised in his black frockcoat and gleaming boots, had caught her eye once down the long table, a swift glance between the candles and flowers.

Did he guess she had some plan?

There was no time to fret now. As she ducked under a snag of cobweb she straightened up into a tall figure and nearly screamed with shock.

He grabbed her. "Sorry, Claudia."

Jared wore dark clothes too. She glared at him. "God, you gave me a fright! Have you got everything?"

"Yes." He was pale, his eyes dark-shadowed.

"Your medication?"

"Everything." He forced a wan smile. "Anyone would think I was the pupil here."

She smiled back, wanting to cheer him. "It will be all right. We have to look, Master. We have to see Inside."

He nodded. "Hurry then."

She led him through the vaulted halls. Tonight the bricks seemed damper than before, the exhalations of the salted walls a fetid air that clouded their breathing.

The gate seemed higher, and as she came near to it, Claudia saw that the chains were back across, each metal link thicker than her arm. But it was the snails that made her shiver: fat, large creatures, their silvery trails crisscrossing the condensation on the metal as if they had bred down here for centuries.

"Yuck." She pulled one off; it came away with a soft plop and she threw it down. "This is it.

He put a combination into the lock."

The Havaarna eagle spread wide wings. In the globe it held were seven small circular hollows; she was about to touch them when Jared caught her fingers.

"No! If the wrong combination goes in, alarms will go off. Or worse, we may be trapped.

This must be done carefully, Claudia"

He pulled out the small scanner and began, very gently, to take readings and adjust them, crouching among the rusted chains.

Impatient, she went back, checked the cellars, returned.

"Hurry, Master."

'T can't hurry this." He was absorbed, his fingers moving gently.

After long minutes she was almost sick with impatience. She took the Key out, looked at it behind his back. "Do you think ...?"

"Wait, Claudia, lm almost certain of the first number."

It could take hours. There was a disc on the door; it gleamed greenish bronze, slightly brighter than the surrounding metal. Over his head, she reached out and slid it aside.

A keyhole.

Shaped like the crystal, hexagonal.

She reached out and fitted the Key into it.

Instantly it leaped out of her fingers.

With a great crack that made her screech and made Jared jump back in terror, the Key turned by itself. Chains crashed. Rust fell. The gate shuddered ajar.

Scrambling up, Jared was frantically checking all the alarms; he gasped, "Claudia, that was so stupid!" but she didn't care, she was laughing because it was open, the gate, the Prison. She had unlocked

Incarceron.

The last chain slid.

The cellars rang with echoes.

Jared waited until every last whisper of noise was stilled.

"Well?" she said.

"No one coming. Everything up there is normal." He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand. "We must be too far down for them to hear. More than we deserve, Claudia."

She shrugged. "I deserve to find Finn. And he deserves to be free."

They stared at the dark slit, waiting. She half expected a crowd of Prisoners to burst through.

But nothing happened, so she stepped forward and opened the gate.

And looked Inside.

25

I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate. I am growing weak. The others are all dead. I have finished the key but no longer dare to use it.

-Lord Calliston's Diary

It was impossible. She stood frozen, felt hope shatter inside her. She had expected dark corridors, a maze of cells, stone passageways running with rats and damp. Not this.

Behind its oddly tilted entrance the white room was a perfect copy of her father's study. Its machines hummed efficiently, its single desk and chair stood uncluttered in the strip of light from the ceiling.

She let out a breath of despair. "It's exactly the same!"

Jared was scanning carefully. "The Warden is a man of meticulous tastes." He lowered the device and she saw from his face he was as stunned as she was. "Claudia, now the gate is open, I can tell you that there is no Prison below us, no underground labyrinth. This room is all there is."

Appalled, she shook her head. Then she stepped in.

Immediately she felt the same effect as before; that peculiar blurring and clicking, the floor seeming to even out under her feet, the walls to grow straighten Even the air seemed different in the room, cooler and drier, not the damp exhalations of the cellars.

Turning back she watched Jared.

"Now that was very strange," he said. "That was a spatial shift. As I said before, as if the room and the cellar are not quite ... adjacent."

He stepped in after her, and she saw how his dark eyes widened. But she was almost too sick with disappointment to care.

"Why make a copy of his study here?" She stalked over and kicked the desk angrily. "It looks no more used than the other one!

Jared stared around, fascinated. "Is it exactly the same?"

"In every single detail." She leaned on the desk and said the password Incarceron and the drawer rolled open. Inside, as she'd expected, was a crystal Key the image of their own. "He keeps a Key at home and one here. But the Prison is somewhere else."

The bitterness in her voice made Jared give her a worried glance and then come to her side. Quietly he said, "Don't torment yourself..."

"I told Finn I'd found the way in!" Disgusted, she turned and hugged her arms around herself. "And what do we do now? Tomorrow I'll be married to Caspar or executed for treason."

"Or you'll be Queen," he said.

She stared at him. "Or Queen. After a bloodbath that will haunt me forever."

She walked away and glared at the humming silver machines. Behind her, she heard

Jared say, "Well, at least..."

He stopped.

When he didn't finish the sentence she turned, saw him bent over the open drawer with the Key inside. Slowly he straightened and glanced at her sideways. When he spoke his voice was hoarse with excitement.

"It isn't a copy. It's the same room."

She stared.

"Look, Claudia. Come and look."

The Key. It lay in the black velvet and he reached out and touched it, and to her utter shock she saw how his fingers passed through the image onto the soft nap below. It was a holoimage.

The holo-image she had put there.

She stepped back, looked around. Then quickly she dived and scrabbled around the legs of the chair. "If it's the same, there was a ..." She gasped, then jumped up with a mutter of bafflement. She held a very tiny scrap of metal. "This was lying just there before! But how? How can it be the same room? That was at home. Miles away." She stared at the open door, the dim cellars of the

Palace beyond.

Jared seemed to have forgotten his fear. His narrow face was lit; he took the metal scrap and looked at it closely, then slipped a small bag from his pocket and sealed the object inside. He aimed the scanner at the chair. "There's something strange just here. The spatial rift seems stronger." He frowned in frustration. "Ah, if only we had better instruments, Claudia! If only the Sapienti had not been so hampered by Protocol all these years!

"Have you noticed," she said, "how the chair is fixed to the floor?"

She hadn't seen it before, but there were metal clasps to keep it in position. She walked around it. "And why here? It's too far from the desk. There's just that light above."

They stared up at it. A narrow, faintly blue light, falling on the chair and nothing else. Barely bright enough to read by.

A cold thought chilled her. "Master ... this is not a place of torture, is it?"

He didn't answer at first, then she was grateful for his measured tone. "I doubt it. There are no restraints, no signs of violence. Do you think your father would need to use such devices?"

She didn't want to answer that. Instead she said, "We've seen all we can. Let's get out." It was past midnight. Her whole body was listening for footsteps.

He nodded, reluctant. "And yet this room holds secrets, Claudia, that I would give worlds to discover. Maybe it is a gateway. Maybe we are not seeing what is here."

"Jared. That's enough."

She crossed to the gate and stepped through. The cellars were still and gloomy. All the alarms were safely in place. And yet she was suddenly shaken by terrors; that dark figures were watching, that Fax was there, that her father stood in the shadows where she had stood, that the bronze gate would slam suddenly and trap Jared inside. She dragged him out so quickly, he almost fell.

Taking the Key, she tugged it out of the keyhole, watched how instantly the gate folded back with barely a clang, the chains linking themselves into place, the snails continuing their relentless slimy progress over the worn wings of the eagle.

She was silent as she followed the Sapient's dark figure through the stacked barrels, silenced by disappointment and bitter failure. What would Finn think of her now?

How Keiro would laugh in scorn and that girl would smirk. And for herself, a day of freedom left.

At the top of the stairs she stopped Jared with a tug of his sleeve. "We should go back separately, Master. We shouldn't be seen together."

He nodded, and in the dark she thought he flushed a little. "You go first. Take care."

She didn't move, her voice bleak. "It's all over, isn't it? Everything's finished. Finn will rot in that place forever."

Jared leaned back on the pillar and took a deep breath. "Don't despair, Claudia.

Incarceron is near. I'm sure of that." He took something out of his pocket, and to her surprise she saw it was the tiny flake of metal from the floor in its plastic wrapping.

"What is that?"

"I have no idea. I'll use the Sapients' tower here and try a few investigations tomorrow."

"Lucky you." She turned sourly. "AH I have to try is my wedding dress."

She was gone before he could answer, slipping up the stairs into the candlelit corridors, the midnight silences and whispers of the Palace.

Jared turned the tiny scrap between his fingertips.

He pushed back his damp hair and breathed out slowly.

For a moment the strangeness of the room had made him forget the pain. Now it came back, worse, as if to punish him.

FOR HOURS they saw nothing of Blaize. He seemed to vanish, but Finn had no idea where.

"There's a part of this tower we haven't found yet," Keiro muttered, "and that's the way out." He sprawled on the bed looking up at the white ceiling. "And that guff about the books–I don't believe a word of it."

Blaize had laughed off their questions about the Prison records. "This tower was empty and possibly made only for these books to be stored here," he had said, passing bread across the table that evening. "I found the place and liked it, so I moved in. I assure you I have no idea how the images come to be stored here, and neither the time nor inclination to look at them."

"But you feel safe here," Gildas muttered.

"I am safe. No one can reach me. I removed all the Eyes, and the Beetles can't get in. Of course, Incarceron has many-ways of watching and I'm certainly under observation, as my images appear in the book like everyone else's. But not at the moment, though, because of the strange power of your Key. At the moment we are all invisible." He had smiled then, rubbing the scabs on his chin. "Now, if I had a device like that, I could learn much from it. I suppose you wouldn't consider parting with it?"

"He wants it." Keiro sat up now, quickly. "You saw how he looked, when Gildas laughed at him? There was a coldness in his face then, a flicker of something. He wants the Key."

Finn sat on the floor, knees up. "He'll never get it."

"Where is it?"

"Safe, brother." He tapped his coat.

"Good." Keiro lounged back. "And keep your sword with you. This scabby Sapient makes me uneasy. I don't like him."

"Attia says we're his prisoners."

"That little bitch." But Keiro's remark was preoccupied; as Finn watched, he rolled off the bed and stood, snatching a quick look at himself in the faceted window glass. "But don't fret, brother. Keiro has a plan."

He tugged his coat on and went out, peering cautiously around the door.

Alone, Finn pulled the Key out and looked at it. Attia was asleep and Gildas was restlessly searching the books, as he seemed to have been doing since they came here.

Quietly Finn closed the door and put his back against it. Then he activated the Key.

It lit quickly.

He saw a chamber strewn with clothes, and there was light there that made his eyes sting

; sunlight through a window. Beyond the circle of the Key was a large, heavy wooden bed, hangings, a wall of carved panels. Then, breathless, Claudia.

"You have to give me more warning! They could have seen you!

"Who?" he asked.

"The maids, the seamstress. For God's sake, Finn!"

She was red-faced, her hair tousled. He realized she was wearing a white dress, the bodice elaborate with pearls and lace. A wedding dress.

For a moment he had no idea what to say. Then she sat next to him, crouched on the rush-strewn floor. "We failed.

We opened the gate, but it didn't lead to Incarceron, Finn. It was all a stupid mistake. All I found was my father's study." She sounded disgusted with herself.

"But your father is the Warden," he said slowly.

"Whatever that means." She scowled.

He shook his head. "I wish I could remember you, Claudia. You, Outside, all of it." He looked up. "What if I'm not really Giles? That picture ... I don't look like that. I'm not that boy."

"You were once." Her voice was stubborn; she squirmed to face him, the silk rustling.

"Look, all I want is not to marry Caspar. Once you're rescued, once you're free, then our engagement ... well, it doesn't have to happen, that's all. Attia was wrong; it's not just about me being selfish." She smiled wryly. "Where is she?"

"Asleep. I think."

"She's fond of you."

He shrugged. "We rescued her. She's grateful."

"Is that what you call it?" She stared ahead at nothing. "Do people love each other in

Incarceron, Finn?"

"If they do, I haven't seen anything of it." But then he thought of the Maestra, and felt ashamed. There was an awkward silence. Claudia could hear the maids chattering in the next chamber; could see beyond Finn a small room with a frosty window, through which glimmered a dim, artificial twilight.

And there was a smell. As she realized, she breathed in sharply, so that he looked at her.

A musty, unpleasant smell, metallic and sour, air that was trapped and recycled endlessly.

She scrambled to her knees. "I can smell the Prison!"

He stared. "There is no smell. Besides, how—"

"I don't know, but I can!"

She jumped up, ran out of his sight, came back with a tiny glass bottle that she uncorked and sprayed lightly into the sunlight.

Minute drops shimmered in dust.

And Finn cried out, because the smell of it was rich and strong and it sliced into his memory like a knife; he clasped his hands over his mouth and breathed it again and again, closing his eyes, forcing himself to think.

Roses. A garden of yellow roses.

A knife in the cake and he was pushing down, cutting, and it was easy and he was laughing. Crumbs on his fingers. The sweet taste.

"Finn? Finn!" Claudia's voice swayed him back from endless distance. The dryness was in his mouth, the warning prickle crawling in his skin. He shuddered, forced himself to be calm, breathe slower, let the sweat cool his forehead.

She was close to him. "If you can smell it, the drops must be traveling to you, mustn't they?

Perhaps you can touch me now. Try, Finn."

Her hand was close. He put his own around it, closed his fingers.

They passed through hers and there was nothing, not a warmth, not a sensation. He sat back, and they were silent.

Finally he said, "I have to get out of here, Claudia."

"And you will." She knelt up, her face fierce. "I swear to you, I won't give up. If I have to go to my father and beg him on my knees, I'll do it." She turned. "Alys is calling. Wait for me.

The circle went dark.

He sat huddled there till he was stiff and the room was unbearably lonely; then he got up, shoved the Key into his coat, and went out, running down the steps into the library, where

Gildas was pacing irritably forward and back, Blaize watching him across a table spread with food. When he saw Finn, the thin Sapient stood.

"Our last meal together," he said, spreading a hand.

Suspicious, Finn eyed him. "Then what?"

"Then I take you all to a safe place and let you resume your journey."

"Where's Keiro?" Gildas snapped.

"I don't know. So, you're just letting us go?"

Blaize looked at him, his gray eyes calm. "Of course. My aim was only ever to help you.

Gildas has persuaded me that you need to travel on."

"And the Key?"

"I must do without it."

Attia was sitting at the table, her hands clasped together.

Catching Finn's eye, she shrugged slightly. Blaize rose. "I will leave you to make your plans. Enjoy your meal."

In the silence after he was gone Finn said, "We misjudged him."

"I still think he's dangerous. If he's a Sapient, why doesn't he cure that pox he has?"

"What do you know of the Sapienti, ignorant girl?" Gildas growled.

Attia chewed her fingernail, then as Finn reached out for an apple, snatched it first, and bit it. "I taste your food," she said indistinctly. "Remember?"

He was angry. "I'm not the Winglord. You're not my slave."

"No, Finn." She leaned across the table. "I'm your friend. That means a lot more."

Gildas sat down. "Any news from Claudia?"

"They failed. The gate led nowhere."

"As I thought." The old man nodded heavily. "The girl is clever, but we must expect no help from them. We must follow Sapphique alone. Now, there is a story that tells how ..."

His hand reached to the fruit, but Finn grabbed it. His eyes were fixed on Attia; she half rose, pale, and suddenly choking, the apple stalk dropping from her fingers. As he jerked forward and caught her she crumpled, her fingers tearing at her throat.

"The apple," she gasped. "It's burning me!"