Текст книги "The Republic of Thieves"

Автор книги: Scott Lynch

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INTERSECT (IV)

IGNITION

“THE FIRST MAGISTRATE has just read the final district report,” says one of the young men, his voice dreamy, his eyes unfocused. Coldmarrow knows from long experience that the more tenuous and subtle mind-to-mind connections are the most demanding to sustain. Any damned fool can blaze their thoughts into the night for magi far and wide to receive like buzzing insects. The intelligence network now flashing thoughts across the city is straining itself to be utterly silent.

“The last district is Black Iris … ,” whispers the young mage.

“Black Iris victory,” says someone else. “By the skin of their teeth.”

“It seems that Patience’s vaunted Camorri were no match for ours,” smirks Archedama Foresight. She wears a leather hood and mantle, a dark linen mask, a mail-reinforced cuirass. Like all the men and women in the second-floor solar of Coldmarrow’s Palanta District house, she is dressed for a fight. “We’ll deal with them last, after all the other satisfactions of the evening have been dispensed with.”

“Necessities, let us rather say,” coughs Coldmarrow, taking deep, steady breaths to help rule his anxiety. The air is close, and it smells of all these magi, their robes and leathers, the wine on their breaths, the oils in their hair, their nervous, excited sweat.

“Why not both?” says the archedama.

“There’s a disturbance at the Karthenium,” whispers the young man who has been reporting on the election. “Someone … Lovaris of the Bursadi District. Some sort of announcement. He may be … ha! He may be switching sides!”

“Damn,” says Archedama Foresight. “But it seems to me that there’s no time like the present. All our targets must be absorbed in the distraction.”

“Oh, they are,” chuckles Coldmarrow. “It couldn’t be working better. Are your people in their proper positions?”

“All of them,” says Foresight.

“Then here’s to necessity,” says Coldmarrow, his mouth suddenly dry. “And to the future of all our kind.”

Coldmarrow speaks a word.

The word becomes fire.

A spark flashes in the dark heart of a jar of fire-oil, one of a hundred, tightly sealed, placed in the space beneath the floor of the room a month before. This jar is half-full, containing just enough air for the flame to breathe the vapors of the oil. The explosion is white-hot, shattering the clay vessels, sucking air and oil into the roaring, all-devouring blast.

Not even magi can move faster than this, or protect themselves with so little warning. The floor moves beneath Coldmarrow’s feet, then comes sharp dark heat, stunning pressure, and sudden silence. Coldmarrow dies taking fourteen magi with him, including Archedama Foresight. He has no time to feel either regret or satisfaction; it will simply have to be enough.

The war lasts nine minutes. It is utterly one-sided, the only possible war magi can wage with any hope of total victory against others trained in the same traditions, to the same standards.

Archedama Foresight’s people discover that their own ambush is stillborn, their positions ready-made traps. They have always been outnumbered by the larger faction of magi they derided as meek, and now those opponents apply their numbers to disproving the slander.

No quarter is given, no fair fight allowed. Strength is brought against weakness. Across rooftops, within lamp-lit gardens, inside the halls of the Isas Scholastica and the private homes of sorcerers, the assault is quick and silent and absolute.

As the tipsy, confused politicians of Karthain clamber over one another in a comical brawl at the heart of the Karthenium, seventy magi die in the dark places of the city, taking only a handful of their killers with them.

Navigator finds Patience alone in the Sky Chamber, staring at the bowl of the artificial heavens, currently mirroring the actual sky over Karthain, the rolling dark clouds summoned to lock the light of moons and stars away. Shadow has been drawn over the city like a cloak, to better hide the evidence.

“It’s over,” says Patience. She speaks real words to the air; the silver threads of thought-speech have unraveled unpleasantly across Karthain; cries of pain and betrayal, cries for help that will never come, and Patience has hardened her mind against most of the noise. “Now we have to live with ourselves.”

“Tell our troubles to the shades of Therim Pel,” says the one-armed woman. She wipes a tear from her cheek.

“We are each one in a thousand thousand,” says Patience. “We have destroyed some of the rarest and most precious things in the world tonight. Our distant inheritors may curse us for what we’ve done.”

“We already deserve their curses, Archedama.”

“So long as there’s still a world leftfor them to curse us in. Come now; help me do it.”

The two women bow their heads, move their hands in perfect concert, and speak words of unweaving that tear at their throats like desert air. The beautiful conjured heavens of the Sky Chamber fade like the memory of a dream, until there is nothing but a dome of plain white stones, grayed with the patina of old smoke.

“Do you wish to see your son now?” says Navigator.

“No,” says Patience, suddenly feeling every one of her years, suddenly wishing for the touch and the laugh of a man who was taken by the Amathel half her lifetime ago. “I’ll speak to Lamora first. But for now I want to be alone for a while.”

Navigator nods and quietly withdraws, leaving Patience alone in the silent vastness of a room that will never be used again.

One final duty remains at the end of this long campaign, and Patience does not yet have the heart to face it.

LAST INTERLUDE

THIEVES PROSPER

1

THE REMAINS OF Gennaro Boulidazi, last of his line, were taken away under his family colors. An apoplectic Brego did most of the work, after being rebuked for his panic and disbelief by Baroness Ezrintaim. She did, however, graciously assign a number of constables to serve as an honor guard.

It was the middle of the night before all the constables and soldiers decamped from within Gloriano’s Rooms, chasing off the small crowd of locals and curiosity-seekers as they went. Baroness Ezrintaim left only a small guard posted outside, their orders to preserve the peace for the “nobles” spending their last night in Espara within.

Jean and Jenora went off together early, to spend that night as they saw fit. The Sanzas, seemingly reluctant to let one another out of their sight, claimed a corner of the main room and drank with Alondo and Donker—not the boisterous drinking of celebration but the quiet ritual of people relieved to still have throats to pour their ale down.

Bert and Chantal fell asleep on one another, wrapped up together in an old cloak. Mistress Gloriano promised Locke she would wake them eventually and pack them off to a proper room. She and Sylvanus then sat together, working on a ribbon-wrapped bottle of some expensive brandy whose existence had never previously been mentioned to the thirsty ingrates pounding her bar for service.

Sabetha was clear and to the point, without words. She found Locke bound up in his thoughts in the main room and dispelled them with a hand on his shoulder. She glanced at the stairs by way of a question, and when he nodded, her smile made him feel something even the cheers of eight hundred strangers hadn’t been able to.

They commandeered an empty chamber. Sabetha used the room’s only chair to wedge it shut and admired her handiwork with grim satisfaction.

They were tired, the smell of smoke was nested deep in their hair, and the last thing they needed was more sweat without a bath, but neither of them cared. They were at home in the darkness in a way that only the survivors of places like Shades’ Hill could understand, and alive to one another’s’ lips and hands as they had never been before. They were still shy, still awkward and unschooled. But if their first night together had been confusing and incomplete, their second … ah, their second taught them why people keep trying.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE END OF OLD DREAMS

1

THE SMELL OF her, the taste of her. Locke awoke in darkness, still awash in those things. His sweat, their sweat, had cooled and dried on his skin, and the bed … he ran his hands over her side of it and found it empty, the blanket thrown back.

He remembered where he was. The upper room of Sabetha’s house off the Court of Dust, the one with the expensively luxurious mattress and the Lashani silk sheets. He couldn’t have been asleep for long.

There was someone in the darkness, watching him, and he knew in an instant it wasn’t Sabetha, knew with every fiber of his intuition who it must be, standing by the faint gray cracks of light at the window.

“What have you done?” he whispered.

“We spoke,” said Patience. “I showed her something.”

Soft silver light filled the room—the cold alchemical globes, in response to a mere gesture of Patience’s. Locke saw her hands moving as his eyes adjusted, saw that she wore a heavy traveler’s cloak with the hood thrown back.

“Where’s Jean?”

“Downstairs, where you left him,” said Patience. “He’ll awaken soon. Do you want to get dressed, or are you comfortable speaking like this?”

The cold Locke felt had little to do with the mere fact that he was naked. He slid from the bed, not caring that he concealed nothing from Patience, and dressed in what he could only hope, ludicrously, was somehow an insolent fashion. He donned trousers and tunic like armor, threw a simple dark jacket on as though it could keep Patience and her words out.

Locke saw that there was something leaning against the wall behind Patience, a flat rectangular object about three feet high, covered in a gray cloth.

“She tried to write you a note,” said Patience. “It was … beyond her. She left half an hour ago.”

“What did you doto her, Patience?”

“I did nothing.” Her dark eyes caught him, seemed to pierce him. Those hunter’s eyes. “To my arts, Sabetha Belacoros is a puppet waiting for a hand, but it would have been meaningless, had I doneanything. She had to choose. I gave her information that led to a choice.”

“You utter bitch—”

“I also saved your life tonight,” she said. “For the second and last time. This is our final conversation, Locke Lamora, if that’s what you still choose to call yourself. I’ve come to render all dues and finish my business with you.”

“Do you want to kill me yourself, at last?”

“Certainly not.”

“And … you mean to keep your word? Money and transportation to see us on our way?”

“There’s no money and no transportation,” said Patience, laughing without humor. “You’ll receive nothing else from us. Your countinghouse contacts will no longer recognize you, and your Deep Roots associates already think of Sebastian Lazari as a gray ghost of a memory. Wherever you gentlemen choose to go next, I suspect you have a long walk ahead of you.”

“Why are you doing this to us?” said Locke.

“The Falconer,” she said.

“So revenge was the game after all,” said Locke. “Well, a creaturelike the Falconer deserved every second of hurt I ever gave him, and fuck youif you expect me to think otherwise!”

“You can’t understand what you took from him,” said Patience, her words hot and thick with scorn. “Your flesh is inert; magic is nothing more than the sound of the wind to you. You can neverfeel it, feel the words leaving you like fire, like arrows from a bowstring! To know that power welling beneath you and bearing you like a feather on a wind. You think I’m selfish for this? Cruel? It’s less than you deserve! Killing him would have been mercy. I’ve killedmagi. But you stole his hands and his voice. You took the tools of magic from him and smashed him like a priceless work of art. You stole his destiny. The Archedama Patience could forgive you. The mother and the mage cannot.”

“I refer you to my former statement,” said Locke, his voice trembling.

A heavy tread sounded on the stairs. Jean burst into the room, slamming the door aside without knocking.

“I don’t understand,” he panted. “I was just … You fucking did something to me again, didn’t you?

“A brief slumber,” said Patience. “I wanted time with Sabetha, and then with Locke. But you might as well hear everything else I have to say.”

“Where’s Sabetha?” said Jean.

“Alive,” said Patience. “And fled, of her own accord.”

“Why do I—?”

“You’ve got nothing more I want, Jean Tannen,” said Patience. “Interrupt me again and Locke leaves Karthain alone.”

Jean balled his fists, but remained silent.

“I’m leaving Karthain too,” said Patience. “Myself and all my kind. Tonight ends the last of the Five-Year Games, and our centuries of life here. Whenever the Karthani find the nerve to enter the Isas Scholastica, they’ll find our buildings empty, our tunnels collapsed, our libraries and treasures vanished. We are removing all trace of ourselves from Karthain down to the dust under our beds.”

“Why on the gods’ earth would you do such a thing?” said Locke.

“Karthain is the old dream,” said Patience. “It’s served its purpose. We have gathered strength, honed our skills, and collected the wealth we need to do what we must. There will be no more contracts. No more Bondsmagi. We are retiring from the public life of this world. Never again can we allow such an institution as this to arise.”

“That … that danger you spoke of?” said Locke, unnerved and startled by the magnitude of the changes Patience’s words implied.

“There are things moving and dreaming in the darkness,” said Patience. “We refuse to risk any further chance of waking them up. Yet human magic mustsurvive, so we must learn how to make it as quiet as possible.”

“Why run us through this damned election?” said Locke. “Gods, why not just put us in a room and tell us this shit and save us all so much trouble?”

“Wise members of my order a century ago,” said Patience, “foresaw our direction beyond a shadow of a doubt. We used our contracts to enrich ourselves, but they also made us arrogant. They fueled the impulse to dominate, to see our powers as limitless and the world as our clay.

“These wise men and women knew that a crisis would break, a time for blood, and the only way to win would be to achieve surprise. They envisioned a disruption of our ordinary lives so profound and yet so routine that it could conceal preparations for a fight when the time came. The Five-Year Games became a regular part of our society, a pageant and a release. But a few of us were always trusted with the original intention of the games, and the knowledge that we might have to employ it.”

“So it was all just … a monumental misdirection?” said Locke. “While we danced for everyone’s amusement, you sharpened your knife and stuck it in somebody’s back”?”

“All those magi that I once described as exceptionalists,” said Patience. “All those brothers and sisters. I mourn them, even as I know there was no convincing them. They will stay in Karthain forever. The rest of us go on.”

“Why tell us any of this?” said Jean.

“Because I value your discomfort.” Patience smiled without warmth. “I described the conditions of your employment very succinctly. We are not vanishing from the world, merely from the eyes of ordinary people. Share our business with anyone and you are alwaysin our reach.”

“Ordinary people,” said Locke. “Well, how ordinary am I, really? What’s the truth of all the tales you spun about my past?”

“You should look at the painting I brought for Sabetha.” Patience tapped the wrapped object leaning against the wall behind her. “I’m leaving it here, though in a day or two it will be nothing but white ash. It’s the only portrait of Lamor Acanthus ever painted during his life. I ought to tell you, the likeness is impeccable.”

“A simple answer!” shouted Locke. “What am I?”

“You’re a man who doesn’t get to knowthe answer,” said Patience, and now her smile was genuine. She was shaking with the obvious difficulty of containing her laughter. “Look at you. Camorri! Confidence trickster! You think you know what revengeis? Well, here’s mine on you. Before I was Archedama Patience, I was called Seamstress. Not because I enjoy needlework, but because I tailor to fit.”

Locke could only stare at her, feeling cold and hollow to the depths of his guts.

“Live a good long life without your answer,” she said. “I think you’ll find the evidence neatly balanced in either direction. Now, one thing more will I tell you, and this only because I know it will haunt and disquiet you. My son preferred to mock my premonitions, but only because he didn’t want to face the fact that they always have substance. I shall give you a little prophecy, Locke Lamora, as best as I have seen it.

“Three things must you take up and three things must you lose before you die: a key, a crown, a child.” Patience pushed her hood up over her head. “You will die when a silver rain falls.”

“You’re making all this shit up,” said Locke.

“I could be,” said Patience. “I very well could be. And that’s part of your punishment. Go forth now and live, Locke Lamora. Live, uncertain.”

She gestured once and was gone.

2

JEAN REMAINED at the door, staring at the gray-wrapped package. Finally, Locke worked up the nerve to seize it and tear away the cover.

It was an oil painting. Locke stared at it for some time, feeling the lines on his face draw taut as a bowstring, feeling moistness well in the corners of his eyes.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. Lamor Acanthus. And wife, I presume.”

He made a noise that was half dour laugh and half strangled sob, and threw the painting on the bed. The black-robed man in the portrait looked nothing like Locke; he was broad-shouldered, with the classically dark, sharp aspect of a Therin Throne patrician. The woman beside him bore the same sort of haughty glamour, down to her bones, but she was much fairer of skin.

Her thick, flowing hair was as red as fresh blood.

“I’m everything Sabetha was afraid of,” said Locke. “Tailored to fit.”

“I’m … I’m sorry as hell I got you into this,” said Jean.

“Shit! Don’t go wobbly on me now, Jean. I was as good as dead, and the only way out of this was to go through, all the way to Patience’s endgame. Now she’s played it.”

“We can go after Sabetha,” said Jean. “She’s had half an hour, how far could she get?”

“I want to,” said Locke, wiping his eyes. “Gods, I can still smell her everywhere in this room. And gods, I want her back.” He slumped onto the bed. “But I … I promised to trust her. I promised to … respect her decisions, no matter how much it fucking cut me. If she has to run from this, if she has to be away from me, then for as long as she needs, I’ll … I’ll accept it. If she wants to find me again, what could stop her?”

Jean put his hands on Locke’s shoulders and bowed his head in thought.

“You’re gonna be fucking miserableto live with for a couple of weeks,” he said at last.

“Probably,” said Locke with a rueful chuckle. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, we should case this place and pack everything useful we can lay our hands on,” said Jean. “Clothes, food, tools. We don’t have to go after Sabetha, but we’d best have our asses on the road before the sun peeks over the horizon.”

“Why?”

“Karthain hasn’t kept up an army or maintained its walls for three hundred years,” said Jean. “In a few hours, it’s going to wake up to discover that the only thing keeping it protected from the world at large has vanished during the night. Do you want to be here when thatmess breaks wide open?”

“Oh, shit. Good point.”

Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.

“Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”

Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.

EPILOGUE

WINGS

1

THE BOY IS six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.

The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.

The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.

All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To revealit.

2

THE BOY is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.

Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.

Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street, and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.

Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the center of it all. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind. Strike, eat, live on the wind.

The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.

The bird is startled.

Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.

The boy needs practice.

3

THE BOY is ten. The boy has run across the hills and forests north of Karthain all night with blood in his mouth. The boy has crouched in the center of a web, still as stone, with venom in his fangs and the faintest sensation of movement rippling across his fur, the air currents of prey fluttering ever closer. The boy has swept high into the sky, chased the sun, learned to strike, eat, and live on the wind.

“You must not,” his mother insists. His mother is powerful, his mother is teaching him her gifts, but she will not let him teach her his own.

“It is not highly thought of, among our kind,” she says. “You are a man! You will think as a man! There’s no room for a man in those tiny minds.”

“I share,” said the boy. “I command. I don’t feel small. If they really are tiny, perhaps I make them big whenever I go inside!”

“You will grow more and more sensitive,” says his mother. “You will tie yourself more and more tightly to them, do you understand? Their lives will become yours, their feelings yours. If they are hurt, you will share all their pain. If they are killed … you may be lost as well.”

The boy doesn’t understand. His mother tells him these things as though there were no compensations. The boy knows that he is alone, among all the magi his mother has presented him to, in his willingness to share the lives of animals.

There is no dissuading the boy. He has tasted life without regrets, life without remorse, life lived on the wind. It is what he is; he returns to himself after each communion feeling that part of the wild has come with, to live inside him.

His mother could make him stop. Even at ten, the boy knows what she holds over him, burns with shame at it. But she will not use it. She lectures and begs and threatens, but she will not speak the thing that would lock his will in an iron strongbox.

She cannot, or will not, but it doesn’t make the boy forgive her. He casts his awareness into hidden places for owls, ravens, hawks. He hurls himself into the sky carrying anger from the ground, and hot blood runs on his talons. He soars to forget he has legs. He kills to forget he has rules and expectations. He never shares this experience with anyone else. He goes alone to the woods, and dead songbirds fall like rain. When he is shamed in his studies or rebuked for his attitude, he remembers the blood on his talons, and he endures with a smile.

4

THE BOY is gone, the man is twenty-five, the man is … lost.

Sometimes he is in the dead gray place. His legs refuse to move. His hands feel like crippled lumps. His tongue throbs with a phantom pain, an electric tingle. He is trapped on a bed as though nailed to it. He cannot remember how he came to be in this place. He sobs, panics, tries to claw his way to freedom with his missing fingers.

Only the smell of the lake relaxes him, the cool fresh scent of the water, the occasional piquancy of dead fish or gull shit. When the wind blows these things to him he can bear the confusion and the torture of the dead place.

When the wind is wrong the shadows around him pour something cold and bitter down his throat, and he goes into the darkness cursing them wordlessly.

5

THE LAKE air blows through the dead place. He takes it in as though no other air will sustain him. It is night; the darkness is offset by the light of a single lamp. Everything is strange; he feels a buoyant force inside his chest, something rising through him like bubbles in a spring. The room is clarifying, as though layer after layer of gauze is being removed from his face.

The light stings his eyes; the new clarity is unnerving. There are shadows moving near the light, two of them.

The man tries to speak, and a strangled wet moan startles him. It takes a moment to realize that the noise is his own, that his tongue is a scrap of cauterized stump.

His hands! He remembers Camorr, remembers steel coming down, remembers the shared pain of Vestris’ last moments washing over him in unbearable waves. He remembers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen. He remembers Luciano Anatolius.

He is the Falconer, and the air in the room is heavy with the smell of the Amathel. He is alive and back in Karthain.

How long? He feels stiff, light, weak. Significant weight has vanished from his body. Has it been weeks, months?

Nearly three years,whispers a soft voice in his head. A familiar voice. A hated voice.

“Mnnnnghr,” he rasps, the best he can do. The frustration comes on like a physical weight. He can sense the currents of magic in the room, feel the strength of his mother nearby, but his tools are missing. The power is there to be wielded, but his will slides from it like sand off smooth glass.

I’ll take care of it for both of us.

Cold fingers of force slide across his mind, and the impotence, blessedly, is lifted. He feels the words as he crafts them, feels them going out to her, mind to mind, his first orderly communication in … three years?

THREE YEARS!

As I said.

Camorr …

Yes, the Anatolius contract.

How badly was I injured? What did they do to me?

Not enough to cause your present condition.

The Falconer ponders the import of these words, flips desperately through his memories like the pages of a book.

A dreamsteel model of a city. Its towers falling into flat silvery nothingness.

Archedama Patience, in the Sky Chamber, warning him that he is headed into danger.

Steel rising and falling. Cauterizing heat, white bolts of pain in his mind unlike anything he has ever imagined. Vestris, dead. Before the blade can come for his tongue he tries to work the spell of pain-deadening, the old familiar technique, but on the other side of it … not welcome relief. Fog, madness, prison.

Now see it all.

Patience speaks a word, and something comes loose in his mind. A patina cracks over an old memory, revealing the truth within the shell.

Archedama Patience. The night of his departure, a brief private audience. She warns him again. Again, he scoffs at the transparency of her ploys. She speaks another word, then, and the word is urgent and irresistible. The word is his name, his true name, uttered as the cornerstone of a spell. He is bound to it, then made to forget.

You…  you did it.

A subtle compulsion. A trap. An irrevocable order sleeping in his mind until the next time he used the art of deadening pain.

YOU did this to me.…

You did it to yourself.

YOU DID THIS TO ME!

I gave you the chance to avoid it.

NO. THE CHANCE TO SHOW MY THROAT.

Your arrogance again. Can’t you see that you were a problem in want of a solution?

AND YOUR SOLUTION…  ASSASSINATION. FAR FROM HOME.

I suppose that’s the only honest way to look at it.

I’M YOUR GODS-DAMNED SON!

I wear five rings. You put yourself on the wrong side of them.

Well.He forces himself to lower his mental voice, to think coolly. There must be danger here. Why is she telling him this, revealing all after three years? You certainly fucked things up, didn’t you?

All I could foresee was that you were headed into serious pain. Therefore I assumed that you would be in extreme danger…  that you would do the obvious thing.

Paralyze myself, you mean! And then it would all be over.

Except your opponents were…  scrupulous.

Ah. Is this what scrupulous treatment feels like? Lucky, lucky me.

I told you, it’s not what I wanted!

You and your gods-damned prescience. Your snide little hints. The way you tried to control everyone around you with them. What good was it, if you couldn’t even see THIS coming at us? Tell me, Mother, have you ever managed to have a vision of your OWN future?

No.

Well, that must be pleasant for you. To be the only real person in your whole damned world, and all the rest of us puppets for your private stage. How does it feel NOW?