Chapter Text
i. olfactory
The Blood of Eden stored information on plex tablets, about the breadth and width of a thick regulations pamphlet, that could be turned into display screens using cleverly-concealed buttons. One of these could hold several libraries' worth of books, according to what Cam understood of their operating specs. Unfortunately, the ghost that lived in her head hated them.
They don't smell right, he told her. She experienced a bizarre synesthesia sometimes when he spoke; that was probably normal, to the extent that anything could ever be normal again. Having someone else sharing space in your brain probably distorted your neural pathways. His mixture of embarrassment and resolve was like the tang of hot coffee on the back of her tongue, as stinging and familiar.
And was he right about the tablets. She'd had time to get used to them, and to get used to most of the Edenite protocols that would strike a House scion as bizarre or nonsensical. Palamedes, on the contrary, had spent eight months (or significantly more, depending on how you measured) entombed in a sickroom as austere as any study cubicle back on the Sixth, going slowly and quietly mad.
I'm not mad. But it was a thin protest, moldering with suppressed terrors. She ignored it.
She had crossed impossible distances and endured frankly insane trials to get him back. She'd have gutted anyone that tried to take him away again. But now that she had him -- the only thing that had kept her alive, the arc of all her motion -- she had his despair and fear and constant fretful worrying as well as her own. And since he lived in her head, he couldn't even try to conceal his pain behind quips and spectacles anymore.
She acquired as many info-tablets as she could and piled them up around their sleeping quarters -- but that was mostly a joke, and soothed his restless homesick longing only a little. So she went in quest of other materials. Most of what she needed could be found in certain paints and dyes, which meant breaking into a few manufacturing facilities.
It was a risk to the greater mission, but Cam did have concerns other than the greater mission. And Palamedes' nostalgic hunger was growing unbearable.
At last she had achieved a mixture of toluene, benzaldehyde, and vanillin, mixed in with wood pulp, that was only mildly toxic. Uncapped, it filled their cramped room with the rich smell of books laid up in stacks and aged for millennia, rotting slowly and subtly in secret places, preserved from light and human touch.
Or close enough, anyway. Close enough that her eyes watered, and she couldn't tell if it was from the stinging fumes of the chemical mixture itself, or from the sudden ferocious longing of the Warden for the Library. For his Library, that he'd never see again.
It was the strength of that longing, and his perfectionism (oh, because you're not a perfectionist he sniped) that drove her to crawl under the tiny bed to scrounge up a hint of dust, to enhance the realism of the recreation. And then it was his allergy to dust that made her sneeze for the next hour and a half.
It's a genetic allergy, he protested. Genetic! You absorbed my spirt, not my genes!
Somehow, this failed to stop Camilla's tear ducts and sinuses from irrationally over-reacting. He finally resorted to brute-force blockade of her histamine receptors, which stopped the sneezing but left her drowsy, dry-mouthed, and with a pounding headache.
I had no idea that would happen, he said as she laid on the rickety uncomfortable bed with a wet cloth over her eyes. In the dark behind her eyelids his guilt flickered in bursts of chem-trail green. Then it faded, and something else took its place -- a fizzing warmth in her fingertips, and a strong sweet scent like vanillin.
Thank you, he said. It smelled like home.
ii. ocular
Even the most brilliant mind the Nine Houses had ever produced occasionally needed to write out his more complex theorem equations, and for that he needed hands. Lacking his own, he borrowed Cam's. Usually in the first half of her sleep cycle. She got used to waking up half-buried in drifts of flimsy, and her first task every morning was to separate them into stacks and clear a path to escape.
She was quite familiar enough with his notation to do this without input from Palamedes. He was usually quiescent anyway, unwilling to talk to her before breakfast. He'd never liked mornings.
In the corner of a graph of hydrostatic River measurements, she found the first pair of eyes. They stared at her from the margin, seemingly unrelated to any other schematics. Free-floating, without a face, but instantly familiar. They were her own eyes -- her old eyes. Impassive, nondescript, tinted somewhere between graphite-gray and dirt-brown. If she peered closely she could see tiny faint frown lines lightly etched between them.
She found them again on the next page, and four pages after that. She started finding them scattered haphazardly among his notes every morning, with no apparent correlation to the subject matter under study.
Close examination of the state of her hands convinced her that, lacking pigment, he used actual dirt to get the color just right. Probably scraped up from the little plant-box with its dying herbs on the neighbor's windowsill.
She chose not to investigate further. She could have asked him plenty of questions, but she didn't need to. She understood perfectly.
It was a matter of preservation. He had been, and still was, the Master Warden of the Library. It was anathema to the cultural mandate that had given him purpose, and against the very core of his being, to let anything beautiful or necessary be lost.
iii. oculomotor
Cam's newfound psychosomatic histamine reaction to dust was a problem, which made no (literally) God-damned sense.
It wasn't the only problem. Cam's visual acuity had also suffered, which Palamedes had tried and failed to explain in any way that was even halfway adequate. The Lyctoral corpus didn't actually assimilate the consumed person's physical eyes. Ianthe Tridentarius hadn't blinded Naberius Tern with a rusty spoon and hooked up his globes of aqueous jelly to her own optic nerves! Honestly Palamedes wouldn't have been surprised if she had done, it would have been just like her -- but the point was that she hadn't, because in addition to being flagrantly gruesome it wasn't necessary. Transfer of eyes was a spiritual concomitance! It had to be! Palamedes' own actual physical eyes had been disintegrated, the fact that the eyes in Camilla's face now looked like his was a manifestation in the corporeal dimension of a spiritual convergence that had nothing to do with the physics of light refraction!
Except the eyes in Camilla's face didn't just look like his, they worked like his. Or, more pertinently, failed to work.
I'm sorry, he told her, for about the dozenth time in the last three minutes. She did not answer, for the very good reason that trying to speak would have resulted in swallowing a mouthful of blood from her gushing nose. Also, he wasn't sure if she could hear him. He suspected that intense somatic sensation -- like, for instance, the throbbing pain of getting your nose broken by a practice sword to the face that you'd failed to dodge -- tended to blot out the still, small whisper of your disembodied necromancer's voice in the back of your skull.
Most of his theories were conjecture. Cam's pain was real -- he could have shut himself off from it, probably, but that would be monstrously unfair since it was his eyes with their piss-poor depth perception that had failed her -- and Nona was real. "I'm so -- sorry," she said earnestly, like it was a word from a language she was still mastering. She was still holding the blunted practice sword, now speckled with blood from Cam's nose. She seemed to be waiting to be told what to do.
Cam was fighting to get enough of a grip on herself to give instructions. No skull fracture, Palamedes told her. It was less helpful than he wanted to be, but he was afraid of messing around too much with an active injury and making it worse.
She ignored him. Or didn't hear him yet. Carefully regulating her breathing so as not to ingest more blood than necessary, she said in a strangled, nasal voice, "It's all right. It's not -- your fault."
Noodle was licking up the puddle of blood on the floor. Nona didn't seem to mind, and Cam had other things to worry about. Half-blinded, she felt her way over to the ragged overstuffed armchair she'd salvaged from a garbage dump and sank onto it. It had enough blood on the upholstery already that no one would mind a little more.
"Get ice," she said thickly to Nona, who drifted curiously after her.
A bag of ice on her nose dulled the pain enough for Palamedes to probe for the posterior nasal arteries and speed up clot formation as much as he dared. The gush of blood slowed to a trickle, and Cam cleaned herself up with a towel. "That's enough practice for today. I'll come find you later," she said to Nona, who scampered off happily enough.
I'm sorry, Palamedes said again.
She heard him this time. "It's not your fault either," she said. "I should have ducked."
This seemed to him like a blatantly obvious salve to his feelings, and he resented it. We're going to have to get you glasses. Somehow.
"You can't fix --" she stopped, sighed, winced as it caused a throbbing spike of pain in her face. No doubt remembering, as he was, the time he'd tried to fix his own eyesight with necromancy and ended up with monstrous cataracts that had had to be removed under anesthetics. "I guess you can't."
You're going to have a hell of a bruise, he said, unhappily, for lack of anything else to say that was even remotely useful.
Cam tried to snort, choked, coughed up a clot and a laugh. "That'll be great for trying to lay low."
You'll need smoked lenses, like Gideon's. And something to keep them from falling off during maneuvers.
"Maneuvers," she repeated, with the flat tone concealing depths of fondness only he could hear. "Fine, but you're buying."
iv. trochlear
Palamedes had not slept since he'd died. He didn't dream -- or perhaps he was in a constant state of dreaming. It was hard to draw clear distinctions between states of consciousness when you were nothing but consciousness.
But the technicalities were the least of his problems. Whatever the mechanism, he found himself inescapably awake in Cam's brain while she slept. He saw the patterns of synaptic firings cascade across her hippocampus. He could not stop himself from deciphering them, from empathetic mirroring, any more than he could stop siphoning her thalergy to keep the dim candleflame of his spirit lit.
In among the usual sensory mishmash and replay of recent events, he caught glimpses of things she'd mentioned from the time he'd been sequestered in the River. He saw the operating theater where non-necromancers had butchered Judith Deuteros in the name of keeping her alive for further tortures. He waited with Cam for eternal stretches of dream-time in a succession of military bases and shuttles. He caught glimpses of an obelisk, blood-encrusted, that he could only assume was the stele she'd seen. And there floated above her sometimes a huge face -- a woman's, presumably, with hair red as the Ninth cavalier's, but with forbidding features that loomed to impossible proportions.
And he saw things that Cam had never told him about at all. The agonizing reassembly of his exploded skull featured quite frequently in her nightmares, always accompanied by the sickening terror that she'd dropped a piece and would never be able to find it again. From his liminal position in her skull, he could see perfectly well the threads of neural connection that pulled from her traumatic memories like deep roots drawing water from a poisoned well.
He didn't try to influence the dreams anymore. The one time he'd attempted to insert his presence into the neural patterns, to say Don't worry, I'm here, the dream had turned into his still-screaming corpse being carved up by the Blood of Eden, and she'd woken with palpitations and nausea that she'd steadfastly refused to acknowledge for the rest of the day.
Unable to look away, unable to interfere, he combated helplessness by thinking up the good dreams he'd give her instead, if he trusted himself to rearrange the patterns of her unconsciousness without causing brain damage. Dreams of -- what? Winning sword fights? Especially good hydroponic potatoes in the refectory, back home? What could he give her, that could possibly repay her for so much pain?
It kept him busy, anyway, watching her eyes flick back and forth beneath her eyelids in the long watches of the night.