Fradjikan was still making gagging sounds there on the floor as the Scapula dashed through the door, holding his good hand tightly over the small gusher on the other. Fortunately, the paralysis of Fradjikan’s voluntary muscles was preventing him from actually expelling the bolus the Scapula had just wedged in his throat, and in another moment or two it shouldn’t matter. Pod Dall would materialize, he would appropriate Fradjikan’s body as his incarnation vehicle - and then the weakened Fradjikan, teetering on the edge of death from his injuries and the Scapula’s special field of sapping paralysis, would experience the last of the Scapula’s carefully planned surprises. But as he went over the abyss to oblivion he would not go alone. The now-incarnate Pod Dall, just emerged from his shell, disoriented, and taken unawares, would be going with him.
Fradjikan saw the Scapula leaving, but his mind was on other things. He wasn’t sure what had happened - why the Scapula had suddenly interrupted his peroration to perform such a deliberate act of auto-mutilation, or why the Scapula had compounded that repulsive move by jamming his gruesome trophy into Fradi’s own mouth - but he knew what was happening. He was choking to death.
The ring stuck on the finger was firmly lodged in his throat. He could feel the hot blood dripping down his gullet; the finger itself was still warm. And he was compounding his own problems - retching and gagging, his mouth filling with bile, his body still on its side but even more on his back, there was no way to clean the ghastly mess out of his windpipe so he could breathe. His ears were roaring, red was marching in from the corners of his vision; he was well on the way to panic. But then he was also in the midst of suffocation. And it didn’t appear likely that Vladimir, Lord of Storms, would be available to resurrect him yet another time.
His mouth was growing warmer, hot, fiery - he barely had consciousness left to recognize it wasn’t his mouth, it was that ring, when something sizzled out of the ring and slid smoothly up into his head and out into his body, a tingly, half-orgasmic sensation rather than one wholly of pain, the narcosis of oxygen deprivation perhaps but still it felt like more than hallucination, it felt as though he were being stroked by an all-encompassing, soothing hand -
What a moment for a transcendental experience.
But then unexpectedly that wasn’t his last coherent thought after all. Somehow he was on his side but now facing the floor, and he was still retching but now enough of the gore had drained to open a slight air passage, and most surprisingly he was no longer in the throes of panic; he now felt fully narcotized. Although he no longer felt fully himself, either - he was changing - he was larger, greater, stronger - he knew so many things, he knew-
His heart shuddered in his chest, and stopped beating.
“Now do you see why the Scapula is so dangerous?” said Gashanatantra.
“He was lucky.”
“Can you think of a worse sort of danger?”
Jill-tang sat next to him, both of them on the divan in her reception room but scarcely reclining in relaxation. Their four hands were tangled in a cat’s-cradle of sparkling force lines, weaving and tugging and braiding, while in the midst of the spell matrix an undulating image of the splattered, eye-rolling Fradjikan wavered beyond a cloud of status indicators. The cloud was now showing an inky black shot through with the streaks of dying comets. “Try this,” said Gash, his fingers tangling in the loom, as a bulbous form the size of two fists coalesced from a converging cluster of red.
Jill leaned carefully in and grasped it with both hands. “Heart massage?” she said.
“Here comes another shock, now!” Gash muttered. The heart-simulacrum convulsed, fell silent, then beat once, forcefully. “Now compress upward from the apex, again, again -”
“Does he have enough of an airway?”
“Let me try shaking him again,” said Gash. “At least we were able to shove him over enough to drain – augh!”
“What?”
“Feedback, can’t feel my left hand. Vladimir may be confined but the shields on his facility are still strong - I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to maintain this connection. I -”
“Hold on anyway, dammit,” snarled Jill. “I don’t want to lose Pod Dall, not now!”
“Neither do I,” Gash said, his teeth gritted. It had been a lot of trouble to stabilize Pod Dall to a stable reincarnation with his sanity intact. A lot of trouble with no assurance of a payoff, but now - “Not with most everyone locked in stasis and the Scapula riding roughshod over the landscape. If -”
The matrix flashed yellow, then blue; a coruscating light-burst snapped out from the center and collapsed, dragging the force-lines back with it like a fishing net caught in a riptide. The suction yanked Gashanatantra from his seat toward the imploding core. Matrix lines wrenched his outstretched hands like the cords of a mad puppeteer, raking his flesh, twisting his bones, as he tried throwing himself to the floor, vocalizing the disengagement trigger. Then the matrix finished falling into itself and was gone. Wisps of disconnected matrix hung twinkling in the air, flickering rapidly out.
“You look pretty well flayed,” said Jill, eyeing his hands. “Serves you right, you bastard.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“You started this, when you trapped Pod in that ring.”
“I didn’t start the Scapula,” Gashanatantra muttered, levering himself up to flop back against the base of the couch. “Would you mind very much lending me a few bandages?”
“I suppose you’ll be wanting unguents next, too, huh? Oh, very well. Wait here.”
“You might as least give me some credit for convincing you not to attend the conclave.”
“Yes, why did you bother?” said Jill. “As things worked out you would have been free of me once and for all.”
“I didn’t know anything would happen. I was just being prudent.”
“Yes, but why be prudent with me?”
“Affairs are becoming more and more hazardous, and the roster of potential allies is diminishing rapidly. You’ve always been underrated. You’ve always underrated yourself.”
“Why are you babbling?”
“I am not -”
“Yes, you are. Why?”
Gashanatantra sighed. “You know perfectly well why. No matter how you’ve treated me I still love you.”
“Are we -” said Tarfon, interrupting her translation of the ancient words scrolling behind the thick glass in the secret room beneath the Archives, “are we - are they going to let us live? If they find out we know these things, are they going to let us live?”
That same concern had already occurred to the Archivist. Except - “Who is ‘they’?” Leen said.
“The gods, I assume.”
“I thought your sect didn’t believe in the gods,” Leen said absently.
“We believe in them, all right. We just don’t believe they’re gods.”
“If what we’ve seen here is any indication,” said Leen, her distraction if anything mounting, “your cult is due for a big boost.”
“That we could live without.” Tarfon sighed. “Nothing to be done about it, though.” She turned back to the words, then paused. How long had they been here working? What time was it? “Um - excuse me, but you’re a Nerve of the Empire or something like that, aren’t you?”