CVU2

Chapter 27: Part 8

8

Vivien stepped carefully over the wreckage and the inert bodies of broken strigoi, touching no one.

"I speak only truth," she told Zvera Comprachicos, stopping and bending forward a little at the shapely waist. "I do not serve the Angry Son, who has not been destroyed. You and he will meet at least once more, in the far north. I have foreseen this."

Zvera stopped four car-spaces away, scowling, uncertain for a few seconds, her falx still half-raised. Then she lowered it.

"He couldn't have made you speak. No one ever made a golem speak. So you're not a proper golem."

"Yes, I am more than he intended - he meant to house me in a crude shape, and he tried to program me to destroy you and your mother. I have read his mind, so I know his belief. Now I will know yours. You speak only truth."

Zvera's eyes and mouth went wide, and she dropped the falx, which clattered upon the cold asphalt. Taking a drone shot through the gut had been unable to make her drop the falx.

The fae enchantress wearing the silver golem body smiled and asked, "Did you order his family dead?"

Zvera wanted to shout and curse and make her heart hammer loudly, but she couldn't even make a face. She could only say: "No."

"Do you believe that your mother ordered their deaths?"

"No."

"Do you know why the Angry Son believes that you and her are responsible?"

The gears in Zvera's mind ground hard and hot under the pressure of the potent white magic, truth-magic.

"No."

"But you have a suspicion you deem likely. Speak it."

One misplaced word, one errant suggestion, one slip, and Zvera knew she would be dead. This was leximancy, vow-magic. This tutelary had conned her into implied truth telling, and then bound her on pain of eternal death to tell only the truth, so long as the tutelary herself only spoke truth.

"I believe that it was Kudlak Grando. That he spread this rumor to distract the ... vogelfrei. To make him come south and strike at us."

"Take care," Vivien tolled. "To speak one name when you mean another under my magic could be the slide into a lie."

Zvera sank to her knees. "To distract the ba ... the vog ... to distract my favorite enemy."

"Yes, it is dangerous to hide admiration with an insulting name under my sight," Vivien told her. "You are not his favorite enemy. He prefers Bruja for her quick blade, but his true favorite is the witch Nocome who sleeps in his head. You will have to try much harder to take the position. I release you."

Coughing, wheezing, shuddering, Zvera lunged for the sword.

"You should know," Vivien said, her 'normal' voice still loud and eerie, "What you have bought for your truth-telling. Your favorite enemy is not as hard as you think him to be, which perhaps will make him less favored in you twisted measure of what is admirable. From his mind I read that he had no knowledge of your sister Satri and truly believed that the first golem was deployed against your mother. Realizing his mistake afterward, he decided to be 'hardcore', in his own words, claiming this to be deliberate. He will probably do his best to act like the monster who would kill a child, but it is an act."

Holding the sword, Zvera felt that she held it awkwardly for the first time. She had held it in strong hands while approaching the silver golem, certain that she would fight it and lose.

"Is this some trickster's doing?" she finally asked, staring up into the painful silver face, those two glowing eyes. "To send us against each other in rage, each convinced that the other struck our family, and each a fool?"

"Perhaps it is. If so, this trickster has a stronger hold on the Angry Son. I have broken you from this knot of fate, but I am not sure if anything could free your counterpart. He believes that the only way to be attractive is to be powerful, and among your kind that means ruthless. So he acts as cruel and mad beyond his true self. He may never admit that the strike upon your sister was accidental."

Zvera's hands went limp, and for part of a second she almost dropped the falx once more. Kotys Comprachicos had not varied her general advice between her daughters, and Zvera remembered her voice now:

Power is what makes you attractive. And when you're powerful enough, you'll take whatever you want.

This guardian couldn't have known ... but it's too perfect! It is some trick, all of it!