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“We fucked it up.”
Dave had said that. Poor bastard. He’d said that facedown over a toilet with a sword in his back. There had been no time to discuss the mise-en-scène, what with the army of trolls, but it consoled Rose somewhat to think that Dave saw the narrative charm in his own death. What was the Latin? Nam bello, mingo. Even in war, we piss. And thus he had done. And the trolls had found them on the Empress’s dread ship as they came to kill her, knowing instead that they would be killed, and he was dead.
They hadn’t fucked it up. Truly, they hadn’t. They’d killed dozens. Hundreds, maybe. He’d died as her vision omnifold demanded he would, and she had been likewise demanded to succumb to a fork, which she had done. She’d expected to die and the torch to be passed to the next set of hands who would carry and pass and carry and pass eventually to the children she and Dave had provided for. Not so simple, apparently, not such a blandly motivational backstory as all that. She had not died; she was here, a prisoner, living, and bored to tears. That little mystery remained.
“Here” was the ship, however. That was unequivocal. She could tell that much from the sound of turbines. When she pressed her ear to the wall or the floor, metal construction carried the sound of distant doors and nearer steps. She’d never been in a human prison, but this seemed reasonable enough for a troll version. A square room with a toilet in one corner. A waist-height pod filled with sickly-sweet smelling green slime. Pudding of some sort. No bed. Her vision omnifold, for all it was worth, suggested the ship was moving. She didn’t know where.
The first few days had passed with no one, seemingly, in any hurry to bring food or water. The walls were smooth and the door didn’t so much as shift when she kicked it. It would be a poor prison door whose lock a prisoner could finagle with the edges of her fingernails, but she did try. Chips of magenta paint flaked off to jab underneath them; no other visible result. On the third day she’d cupped her hands and scooped water from the toilet into her dry-paste mouth, because being willing to die in battle and willing to die of dehydration next to a source of water were different things. It had tasted of metal, but not much else. On the fifth day, because there was simply nothing else to eat, she’d eaten a scoop of the pudding.
That had been interesting.
That had been a slick and oozing bad decision in the palm of her hand, more accurately. A hard soporific and something else that made this whole prison thing seem like nonsense. Utterly unworrisome. Happening to someone else. She hadn’t touched that sort of thing in years. She’d been very careful.
It had taken at least a day to stand up again after those few slippery mouthfuls, or so she gathered from how thirsty she was. It could have been longer. It was hard to tell, and she was already hungry and tired. Her head cleared slowly. Water and pacing helped. But the walls were just walls, not very long, and the toilet had long since lost any novelty. She was very hungry. She supposed, on reflection, that she was starving. For once, actually starving. Wasn’t that charming. Calmasis had been imprisoned, once, in what she was prepared to admit was a heavy-handed allegory so early in the series. It had been in a walled garden, though--a garden almost solely of fuchsias.
Fuchsias. Subtle as a brick. Well, she’d been younger then.
Calmasis had been reduced to drinking pond water and eating spiders. There could have been a similarly heavy-handed allegory with the spiders, but she hadn’t really felt like it. Calmasis, in a matter of just a few days of such grim privation, had found themself a haggard wreck, hard-pressed to so much as stand. Shoddy research, she supposed. Even without spiders, she could stand perfectly well. Tired, yes, aching, yes, but stand. Stand, and walk, and drum on the door with a fist for all the good it did. Calmasis had called upon dread powers, and given up part of their soul for a ring that allowed them to walk through the stone blocks of the wall like air. Rose had never noticed any indication that she had a soul, and the dread powers were simply trolls. If any of them had a magic escape ring, she doubted she’d be receiving it any time soon. So much for the novelist solving her own problems through an eerie narrative prescience. There were limits to how far one could stretch such things, she supposed. Maybe that was meant to be eerie narrative prescience for the girl who came after her, whoever she was.
“Blood pact?” she offered the door. It was rhetorical, mostly. No answer, same as it ever was. No anything. Her voice was raspy from days of disuse.
How long had it been? A week? There were people outside the door; she heard them occasionally and felt the tromp of their boots through the floor. No one had said a word through it in all that time. No one had so much as tapped it in response to her. And no one had passed anything to her through it, much less food--there was no way to do so. No hatch, no panel, nothing but flat metal painted the same hectic fuchsia as the rest of the walls.
There wasn’t much to stand for, she supposed. Not anymore, really. Another few handfuls of the pudding disposed handily of a day or two. Another, when she came back. Why not? Her heroic options, it seemed, had been exhausted. She’d tried bargaining, she’d tried offering, she’d tried praying as well as she knew how to whatever dread powers might be listening and inclined to open the door or at least deliver some god-damned cheese bread. But here she was with increasingly ropy hands holding nothing of the sort, and the featureless door stayed locked.
She had no idea what time it was. Or what day, or month. Time had been Dave's thing. For all that she missed him dearly, he'd concluded his little story arc. They didn't even turn the lights off at night here--or day? How did trolls measure time in space?
She was forty-four years old. Her vision omnifold had led her here and no further. Her clothes stank and her hair felt like a firm cap of grease on her head. Her back hurt. Her shoulders and stomach hurt. Her hips hurt. Her head hurt, when it wasn’t spinning or insensate, and when she was reluctantly conscious of her diminishing self it hardly seemed worth the time to stand. Easier to prop her hipbones against the wall behind her and use that vision omnifold’s remaining fumes to scry the stellar wastes outside the ship. For what? Earth? There was nothing there she could see. Dust.
The pudding was fluid enough that eating it wet her mouth like drinking. And when she ate it, hungry or thirsty was an ignorable thing. Eventually, as the time passed, she found herself inside the pod. Neck-deep in the stuff. It was easier.
It had been a long time, she imagined. And then, one day, when her eyes swam back down from the tops of their sockets and tried to focus, the door was open. Just like that. Had she done that, somehow?
The clouds in her head parted long enough to register a few things about what had changed. There was a visitor. Horns. Hair. Troll. Fuchsia. Gold. Empress, then. Batterwitch.
Should she care about that? She should probably care about that.
“Holla,” the Empress purred liquidly, the O spread into an ah of pleasure and the L a delicate flick of tongue against teeth. Hearing it made Rose’s mouth water, or try to.
She swung leisurely toward the pod, thick hips asway and hair hissing across the floor behind her. Her bracelets clinked as she braced her arms on the edge of it and leaned over; her face was inches away. Rose blinked at it, eyes gummy. She should definitely care about this. Some starved-out, sopor-choked part of her pride insisted that she haul out of the bowl of pudding. Dave could deal with important matters from a tub of jello: Rose Lalonde had more dignity than that. One arm over the edge of the pod, one haul, and she could pull the Batterwitch’s fish eyes out with her teeth and finish the job. It was that close. One arm. Vision omnifold be damned, her sight could be fallible just this once.
She tried to lift them through the viscous goo. It felt like hauling anchor chain.
“Come a little closer,” she croaked, tipping forward.
“Nah,” chuckled the Empress, stirring the slime with a jeweled finger. “F’reel, I’m useta a betta class a fuckers tryna whack me. Dis is just...”
“Embarrassing,” Rose finished for her, sloshing up against the front of the cocoon while black spots swam across her vision. She’d tried to use energy she didn’t have. If she was honest with herself, the energy she did have was about enough to keep her head out of the slime.
“Ya don’t say,” agreed the Empress. Her finger tipped Rose’s chin up; Rose hitched a dismissive eyebrow at her. It was the least she could do. Hard done by as she was, it took more than meeting a pair of pink alien eyes to ruin Rose Lalonde. She’d stared down Jon Stewart, for fuck’s sake.
“I eelready fixed ya ship once,” the Empress mused. “Afta tha fork an’ all? Fishtured ya had promise. Thought I’d keep ya here a while til I fin-ished sealin’ to some otha triflin’ shuckup.”
“I don’t have,” and Rose spat the words with more vehemence than she thought she had in her, “a fucking thing.” It was true.
“Sea, there’s where ya wrong.” A broad, contented shark-smile creased those pink eyes. “I got eelnough for everymoby.” She leaned forward to press cold lips to Rose’s.
Life flowed into her through the contact, that was the only way Rose could think of it. Her eyes flew open and stared at the Batterwitch’s, languidly half-closed, as the idle chill kneading at her mouth formed the focus of a bolt down Rose’s throat to her spine. A harsh pain incandesced down that channel and branched out into static along the dendrites of her nerves, then washed hotly gold with the sudden pleasure of pain erased. It felt like food. It felt like sex. It felt like being, like absolutely being, and she had no say in it. She went rigid, vision white, and sank into the muck.
She stood up choking out of the slime a few seconds later and saw the Batterwitch perched smugly on the toilet, watching her. “What did you do?” she demanded, fists curling. The pain was gone and she felt better than she had in years. Strong. Her head was clear. And that meant, she realized: you can still do this.
Fingers locked for a needle strike, she leapt.
“Naw,” said the Batterwitch, grinning. Something on her tiara flickered.
Rose hovered, inches from that face again. It looked even more smug this time. Slime tickled in rivulets off her legs and back as she hung there suspended, all her limbs clamped in place by some...weird light. Police lights?
“Lemme jus tell ya now,” sighed the Empress, “maybe ya think ya got it. Ya aint got it. Chill.”
Rose spat. It was a cliche thing to do, horribly cliche, but as with most cliches there was a reason for that. It felt marvelous to do it. A big blob spotted the goggle over the Empress’s right eye. She scrubbed a sleeve at it impatiently.
“Maybe I don’t,” Rose snarled, “but I know who does. I see all.” Bluster, mostly. She didn’t have much else to work with.
“Funny you say it like dat,” the Empress said, standing. “C’mon. You gunnel meet the last piece a ship who tried this.”
It was a funny thing. There was embarrassment and there was embarrassment. There was tripping up the stairs at the Oscars. There was saying “ass” instead of “ask” in front of a packed Congressional hearing. There was the voice of Mrs. Schuyler, her fourth grade teacher, laughing in the back of her head whenever she read her own work in public. Bobbing along like a filthy parade float behind a telekinetic alien horror-queen was bad, certainly--she was blushing, inevitably, nothing to be ashamed of there--but all told, the simple absurdity of it took the edge off both the shame and the fear. They passed through the narrow halls lined with trolls in a variety of uniforms. Rose’s head was locked straight ahead; details were hard to come by, especially considering how much of what was in front of her was hair. But it was getting more poorly-lit as they went, the walls plainer, and the uniforms they passed became simpler to the point of coveralls. No insignia at all, no rank--just a gold fork over the breastbone. They bowed nearly to the floor as the Empress passed, and snickered when just a few yards later, Rose did. Bah.
The smell of an engine room crossed species, apparently. At least it did closely enough; there was more ozone than diesel here. She was supposed to meet someone. Or see someone, at least, someone who’d apparently tried to kill the Batterwitch. She half-expected a taxidermied corpse, but why would anyone keep that in an engine room? And then, she supposed, she’d be executed.
She strained against the weird light that held her. She’d come here expecting to die. Her vision omnifold had been unambiguous on the failure she and Dave had shared, here, and all the signs and portents she’d filtered out of the ether had given her very little reason to doubt she’d meet her unsung end on this ship. But damn it all, it would be pathetic not to try. Vision omnifold and resignation omnifold were different things.
“I won’t run,” she tried. “Where would I go?”
“Shhh, guppy,” murmured the Empress ahead of her. She stopped, and Rose’s momentum dunked her face into the hair before she jerked back as though on elastic. Polychrome light flickered everywhere, in this room. There was a low, rhythmic thrum-thrum, pulsing and organic the way engine rooms were.
“Sup,” said the Empress.
“Fuck off,” said the room. The thrum changed shape to make those words; Rose could feel them in the hollow spaces of her chest. It sounded tired.
“Brought somefin for ya,” the Empress continued blithely, swinging Rose to her front. As her body swivelled Rose could see banks of lights straight out of a pulp science-fiction show, blue and red tendrils of something twining around through ducts and wiring and blending to match the Batterwitch fuchsia. And as she came to bear, on the Empress’s line of sight, she could see a column of those tendrils, thick as an arm, from floor to ceiling.
There was somebody in them, arms held over their head. It took a few seconds to even discern that it was a troll. Four horns, goggles.
“So she got you too,” it said. Rose saw its mouth wasn’t moving, not to shape words--but it was smirking. Rose felt a rush of indignation and crushed it; there were better things to spend her remaining time on. The Empress’s rings clacked on her head as she rumpled the mats of Rose’s hair.
“Shore did,” the Empress crowed. “Been finkin ya needed some shellp down here. ‘Cause people tryna bring the pain ain’t neva done nofin but bring me betta equipment.”
Behind the red and blue lenses, Rose saw a flicker of movement as the troll in the column examined her directly.
“She’s about as psionic as a wet paper bag,” said the thrum.
Sucks to suck, doesn’t it. That was a different voice, one that wasn’t echoed by the physical thrum in her chest. Rose stared as the column-troll’s shoulders hitched up minutely, then relaxed into lassitude. Like it’s worth shit, but...sorry. That’s my thing she’s using to drag you around. I’d let you go if I could.
It wasn’t supposed to work, she thought at it. Him? Killing her. It wasn’t supposed to work, regardless.
Good thing. The voice was dry. Rose could hear the background conversation proceeding uninterrupted: they were talking about her sight. Or Sight, more accurately. Apparently trolls read the same breathless exposés humans did. She was tired of this. Bone tired in a way that the Batterwitch’s bizarre kiss of life couldn’t touch. The prison, the being dragged around, none of it mattered. It wouldn’t un-pass the torch, or let her meet the girl who had to do what she couldn’t. Her work was done. Resignation omnifold.
No, no, to hell with that, to hell with that--she was out of the cell, she wasn’t starving anymore, the column troll was already on her side--what were a few signs and portents compared to an arsenal like that? Use this, Rose!
They’re going to put you in here with me. For navigation.
How?
Fuck if I know. They don’t send batteries to tech school.
So that was it. Rose took a deep breath and tried to let her head drop; it couldn’t. The Empress was still talking, waving her hands to illustrate something that the column-troll barely seemed to register.
“Get it over with,” Rose snapped. At some point in the process, the Batterwitch would have to release her grasp.
The Empress’s head swiveled. Rose would have met her eyes defiantly, but for facing in entirely the wrong direction. “The shell ya say?”
“Get it over with. This whole milieu-” Here, she’d have waved a hand dismissively if she could. “This imperial thing, with the prison and the bowing and the little forks on everyone. And all the gold. It’s shallow, isn’t it? It’s ridiculously insecure. I can’t be the first to tell you this.”
The Empress made an incredulous sound. Rose felt the hold on her weaken slightly.
“I’m done with it. I’ve done what I needed to do. And my god, you tedious fish-hag, I have never been more bored in my life. Do whatever it was you were going to do with me.”
Damn, human.
“Ya talk too much,” the Empress hissed, twisting her by a handful of hair. “Fucker with ya talked too much too. Sea-startin’ ta think humans don’t get ta talk at all. AY SHIPHEADS!”
A small crowd of the coveralled trolls were already watching in the doorway, she could see them between the Batterwitch’s horns. They startled and shifted at the order, eventually parting to allow through a couple of better-fed looking specimens with an extra fork on their chests. They bowed, then leaned and craned to get a look at Rose’s still-frozen form.
“Plug ‘er in.” Rose wheeled erratically through the air toward them, ending up awkwardly splayed across both their chests; the Empress dusted her hands off and stalked vengefully out of the room in a cloud of curls and irritated red-blue sparks. “Next basshoal who says a fuckin’ word ta me’s gettin’ their lungs culled out.”
The troll held her out at arms’ length for a few seconds, unsure how to proceed. “I’ll make you all famous,” Rose promised eyes still pointed rigidly at the ceiling. But the grip was loosening, just a little, already. “Just drop me. That’s all you need to do, and I’ll take care of everything.” Some of Zazzerpan’s purplest lines crept into her mind. It was the height of self-indulgence, but she quoted herself. Could she distract them long enough?
“I will make you,” she promised, in the queenly public-reading voice Mrs. Schuyler hated, “lords of all that has a lord. I will give to you--I will give to your feet the power to crush and conquer…”
Oh god her head moved, HER HEAD MOVED
“...so long as those feet walk away from me.”
Pfffft, said the silent voice of the column troll. Windbag.
THAT’S THE POINT, Rose thought back fiercely. Her toes could curl, her fingers bent!
Seriously, though. We’re on a ship in deep space. There’s not a whole lot you can do here. Kill a few trolls, live a little longer, die.
Kill the Batterwitch, she corrected the column troll, starting to struggle in earnest. Coveralled arms fought to curl around her legs and neck. So much for Zazzerpan’s wizardly charms.
Yeah, that went well. Like when you had help, the element of surprise, and a weapon.
Shut up, she growled at it, half-aloud. An elbow bracketed her throat, rough cloth chafing under her chin.
Nothing personal. I can throw whales around and I couldn’t do it either. I wouldn’t mind the company, you know. Shit gets old down here. Mostly me. Hah.
Hilarious, she told it. Her heel connected with something between someone’s legs, behind her. She had enough slack to twist and bite, which she did.
I’m not joking, though, said the troll, in measured, thoughtful tones as though Rose wasn’t being fumbled around like a greased sausage. It’d buy you time anyway. Worked for me. She’ll be heading back to your planet eventually...could make it a lot sooner if you’re the one giving directions. With your creepy seer thing or whatever that is. Headlights.
You’re just a battery, Rose growled as a rough grab send a wrench of pain through her knee. How much control do you have?
Not much, it admitted. But some.
It waited a few seconds while Rose struggled out of one grip and half-out of another; more trolls came in from the corridor outside to pile on. She was panting already.
More than you’ve got now, it said.
Fine, Rose said.
She went limp. The nameless trolls she’d been fighting lost no time in taking advantage of this. If she had been writing the scene, she would have described lovingly how stoic she was as she was led to an adjacent room, full of wires and pipes and tendrils as the other had been, and how awe lit the faces of the trolls servicing her as they parted the back of her dress and wiped the worst of the grime from her skin.
The detail she would have lavished on the process! How her back arched in the frame for the procedure, legs stretched elegantly behind her and arms allowed to fold over her chest inside the apparatus. No mention of the abortive attempt to make a rude gesture. She would, perhaps, have delved a little indulgently into pathos as she described the individual agonies of the insertions marching up from tailbone to occiput through the skin of her back and the intervertebral cartilage.
Like as not she’d have needed a glass of something before describing the fuchsia tendrils prodding through those little stented wounds. Tea, of course. She didn’t drink liquor anymore. Though for that--she might have done. She would have omitted the missteps entirely. No one particularly needed to know about the misaimed tendril that knotted inside her intestines instead, or the too-firm clutch of another around her spine that made both legs go numb.
When the subcutaneous swirl under her scalp found an outlet, it felt like a release of pressure. Her vision went dim--she’d have described her vision going dark, rather, though that was never an easy thing to do without blandly mimicking the thousands of writers before her who’d tried to capture the shock of abrupt blindness. She’d have done her best, certainly, but the fact of the matter was that she could no longer see. The nerves of her body were dim signals, others trickling in to take their place.
Her eyes opened. It felt like that; maybe they didn’t, not the purple ones, but something did. And she saw the emptiness of space, stars clustered in the distance. She knew what they were; she knew how long it would take to reach them at what speed. Her vision stretched out immeasurably, past what she could see to what she could See. There was an edge out there, she thought.
Inside her body, hundreds of trolls. Sad ones, hungry ones, and the Condesce’s thick fuschia throb moving restlessly through all of it.
How’d it work?
Well enough, Rose replied. The ship shimmied gently as she spoke.
Watch it, said the column troll. The engine. You’ll have plenty of time to fuck things up later.
How much time? she asked.
The engine thought about that for a while. Well, it said, finally,
Pretty much all of it.