Page 129 of The Mercy Makers
The other hidden arch leads through a narrow, dim corridor, and then to a staircase cut in a tight spiral down into the bedrock.
Several design nets span the way, which she bends around herself easily, and at the bottom is a null door. Iriset skims her palm along the outer frame until she finds the design panel, then uses her broken stylus quickly to dismantle the lock. It should set off an alarum in the office of the Architect of the Seal, but she engages a delay to slow the notification, to earn herself a few minutes.
The door slides open, the light behind her piercing into darkness, revealing the numen.
Iriset jams her stylus into the arched doorframe, ruining the null. She’s able to pull out a few threads and knot them into a dim light. Then she steps inside.
A smell like after a severe lightning storm pervades, dank and dangerously electric. But everything is clean, pristinely so, and Iriset wonders if numena shed skin or hair or relieve themselves at all.
It crouches in the center, on its haunches, long pinkish-white arms hanging to either side with the knuckles turned under. Lank hair drags around its face and neck, falling like an old stained-and-tattered silk veil. When it sees her, the numen grins, showing jagged black teeth like a shark.
Iriset kneels beside it. She nudges its chin up with her closed fist, and like before, the drained pink skin shimmers silvery where there’s contact. It does not resist, its vivid black diamond-shard eyes locked onto hers. It seems curious, not hostile.
Quickly she unknots the lock with her stylus. The numen gasps hard as the collar falls away, and shoves at it with one foot, then raises its hands to Iriset: Both are chained with null wires. It really would have been easier to use the hematite.
“Thank you for keeping my secret,” Iriset says, eyes down, as she works on the shackles. So near to the creature, she smellsthe lightning scent coming from it. The wires take another long moment to untwist and break, and Iriset swings her bag off her shoulder to tuck them inside it, just in case.
Then, as the numen rubs its raw wrists, she backs away to the door.
It stands slowly, head bowed, as if drawn up by the shoulders. Those shoulders heave as it takes a long breath, seeming to grow taller, and as Iriset stares, she feels forces sliding toward it like it draws them in as it draws in air. Her skin tingles and her inner design pops.
Color flushes its skin; silver, peach, and black lines appear where arteries and veins bulge in its flesh. Its hair thickens, lifting into long waves of silver-white, and the numen smiles as it tears threadbare trousers off itself, and the ragged vest, until it’s naked, with a human-looking penis. Muscles cord along the starving, bony lines of its hips and ribs, thighs and chest. It lifts its face finally and its eyes are as sharp a black as ever, but the whites have cleared of tawny yellow-pink illness. When it smiles, Iriset watches with an uncomfortable fascination as its black teeth become a perfect white-ivory and blunted into human teeth except for two on either side that retain too much of a point.
By the time its teeth finish re-forming, it’s wearing slim black trousers and boots, as well as a black robe with red stitching. Iriset understands instinctively that the numen crafted the costume out of pure force, just as it changed its body at will.
She can hardly breathe.
The stories are true: Numen are pure design. They’re not flesh, but force. Except, something formed of more than energy has been trapped within the null wire. Iriset opens her mouth to ask—she can’t resist asking—but the numen is before her suddenly, and grabs her wrists in cold, long-fingered hands.
It says a word, the same word it said the first night they met in the mirané hall. Now the word does not slither between too-large, too-sharp teeth, but is whole and firm, and obviously Old Sarenpet. She almost recognizes it.
“I don’t understand,” Iriset says, straining slightly against its grip, though not with her full strength. She doesn’t want to be free, she onlywantsto want to be free.
“Sunderer,” it says in mirané.
“I freed you, yes. I—I sundered your bindings.”
The numen smiles and strokes a finger against the inner skin of both her wrists.
In that moment, Iriset experiences a thing there are not quite words for any longer. And the word they used to have (rivation) would have been meaningless to Iriset or anyone. A feeling, a sensation, of coming apart while remaining intact. It is an exact process the numen instigates within her. An ancient process. Seeming apostatical, but in truth so far from that as to be its opposite. Sacred.
The numen peels the threads of force within Iriset open to even smaller elements and, in that action, creates new energy.
(When it happens to you, it feels like love.
Warmth, urgency, longing, belonging. Love.
It feels like congress with the Moon-Eater.)
Sweat beads on Iriset’s skin, released from the inner heat of creation. She’s herself, she knows herself, but a tangible flavor hovers in her awareness, gathering in her pulse, and she almost grasps what the numen has done. “What?” she asks.
“You are a sunderer,” it says. “You can make force.”
“Make force? No, forcesexist, they can be bound, knotted, woven, given direction, or paused, but not created or destroyed—only Aharté creates force.”
The numen snorts. “Aharté.”
Well, Iriset does agree with that sentiment.
