That was a year ago. Much later, on Fulcanelli, inside the capital city library at Euksenos, Ari rented one of the public-use technocrats and shoved the wax Fusenge cylinders into the back of its neck to replay whatever was on them.
This would be very telling, she knew, expecting a storm of gibberish. Moving slowly, almost with reverence, she placed the speaker against her ear to keep out the endless shuffling of feet, the cicada-like call of the market outside, the distant din of the Euksenian clock, tolling the hours according to imperial time.
Carefully, she shut them all out.
When she closed the flap and stood back, there was a lugging sound within the technocrat's insides. The brass features of the Turk contorted grotesquely in a mockery of human speech, mother-of-pearl irises rolling in their sockets, nickel plated lips clacking together in tandem with the recording. Ari suffered this display for a few minutes, before reaching behind the Turk's faux shirt and removing the mainspring, rendering the automaton once again immobile. Even the Other inside her brainmeat ceased its/her constant tumbling and turning in her mind in a show of gratitude.
The woman closed her eyes and concentrated on the gentle hiss of the needle as its graphite tip slid across the grooves. From the hidden speaker on the technocrat's chest came the voice:
"Portentsclear:Artephiusinsurrectionhasbecomelongandpointless. ThirdQueensFleetmakinglandfallcomeJune. SchemesapparentinHoundoperativesacrosssystem.
Assassinationattempt, enactedbylocals, paidoffbycolonialauthorities. NativeswillabandonthefightfollowingL-Bombdeployment. Mustarrangeforshowofsacrifice, warcrimetostirthefighters. Uk'Malmakesforexcellenttarget. Goodmenwilldie.Necessarysacrifice,tofuelnewreligion."
From the deepest, darkest confines of the Other, from the red place inside Ari's thought-space, came the terrible push of her repressed rage. It bore down on her in the moment like some hewn stone behemoth, a juggernaut as big as the world with his face as masthead.
Ari couldn't help but notice the plainness of his features: the protruding jaw of the Hapsburg-Romanov line (telltale mark of a thousand years of incestuous purity), the crooked hawk-like nose, the shock of red curls at the top of his skull. And the eyes—Gods, the eyes—like pools of black stillness, the vortices of Azathoth, hungry and wanting, so big they could take in the entirety of the Universe and still not be enough to quench the thirst inside his brain.
"Still,thereareloyalistsinFulcanelli. TheCultoftheSonliveson. Goodsoiltoplanttheseedsfornextwar. Machinerythatwillfuelthefleetthatwillovertakemother, burnPraguetotheground. IwillbuildtheNewChurchonthefoundationsoftheoldregime. Butfirst, aprecioussacrifice. LikeWoden, strungfortheslaughter. Becomeascendantthroughthetrialofthecrucible."
The behemoth stops, screeching to a halt. The Other's rage dissipates in a flash. Suddenly, she is silent. Ari reaches out into the Other's mind, extends empathic talons into her, wrenching Information by Force.
The Other fights her back, erects a wall of brutish defenses. Currents of flame shoot across her spine. Her eyeballs swim in the boiling fluid of her braincase, the ichor that is her blood boiling in her veins like molten lead.
Clenching her teeth, Ariachne invokes the techniques of her training, curls the dark parts at the back of her brain into a ball, and then further compacts herself until she is dense, tiny, unbreakable; allowing the Other to lash out with every iota of strength until she is utterly spent.
Empath disciplines require strict self control to stem the drain from the user's system. Pouncing on the Other at the slightest sign of a chink in her defenses, little Ari plunges inside and balloons outward, crushing her resolve. The Other remains dazed, reeling, unable to stop Ariachne as she extracts the information.
A cloud of trivial, useless impressions flies up at her, choking her with pointless trails of memory. But Ariachne is a burrower by nature; distilled from what she had once been (a spy, a seducer, a procurer of whispers) and stuck inside the Other's mind like a destructive urge, like the compulsion to jump. She slips past her defenses when she is good and spent, wrangles the information out of her, brings it out, bulling, into the surface.
The Other fights her even as the woman dissects her, arranges her thought patterns into neat slivers of memory, lays out her life against the glass walls of her camera obscura and illuminates the isolated chamber. There, she watches it unfold. A courtship for the ages, the meeting of a headstrong mortal woman and the near-god of the Habsburg-Romanov line.
Meetings in the battlefield, an exchange of vows, softly spoken as they writhed in a bed rocked by the orbital shelling on the planet Cibinensis. Drawn to Him like a moth to a flame, she ached. An emperor vying for ever greater glory since the moment she first drew breath and took in her humble beginnings.
Ariachne takes the woman's simple beginnings in. A street urchin, organizing the rest of the abandoned in dusty side streets, before she finally picks the wrong Dragoon's pocket. A thrashing turned into a scolding turned into a job offer: service to the Empire in her Majesty's Armed forces.
"You'd make leftenant in five years. Three, if there's another war. More than a girl like you could ever ask for."
And the war came. A native uprising that dragged on for two years, with the Other trudging through the clinging off-blue muck even as an alien sun beat down on her back. She fought as hard as she gave, stuck with her rank as much as she could, tried to stay in the officers' good graces. By the end of it, she'd been made Colonial Dragoon, with a sun-gun of her own and a uniform and a hidden stash full of Colonial Gold, pilfered from all over the system.
So she took a lover. A homeworld commander, still green from the Academy. He fell for her, head over heels, so much so that he didn't even notice her courtship of one regional commander after the other. He stayed true to her, that forgotten soul; vouching for her character right until the moment she abandoned him, the second she knew she'd outranked him.
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