And that was the last thought I had before falling into a depthless dreamless slumber.
I woke when the wagon began moving forward, feeling so tired I was unsure whether I’d slept for mere moments or a month. I sat up and the first thing I noticed was that a prone Braylar had been replaced by a seated Lloi, facing the rear of the wagon.
I stretched and sat up as well. When she heard me, she turned and offered me her small pouch of seeds in her nubby hand, which I declined. She popped a few more in her mouth, working them open with a dexterity rodents would have admired before spitting out the shells. “Captain Noose figured he been drifting off course long enough. Time to get rolling right and center again. Didn’t bother waking you, on account of you not sleeping last night. I already told him what befell while I was riding solo, but he cautioned me to be ready to retell it again, should you have questions. Which we both figured you might, as you can’t seem to help yourself. So,” she offered me the seed pouch again, which I accepted this time. “Ask what you got to ask.”
I wasn’t sure where to begin. My questions came in a flood, “What happened to you? Where did you disappear? Were you outrunning the ripper, or-”
She held up her hands, or hand-and-a-half anyway. “Whoa, easy there, bookmaster. Nah, wasn’t no ripper delayed me none. That is, I seen the feathered bastard, and followed at a real respectful distance for a fair bit. But I knew he hadn’t seen the wagon. They got a real taste for horse. He seen the horses, would’ve been too good a meal to pass up, wagon or no. That ripper moved off in the opposite direction, so he weren’t a worry no more. No, the reason I didn’t come back right quick was, there was a Grass Dog party, looking for those hunters that ripper gutted. Big one, armed to the teeth. They had some outriders, doing what I been doing, and they were heading for the tracks this wagon left in the earth. They found those, that party would’ve run you to ground, killed you deader than dirt, no question. So I gave them a different track to follow, led them back toward the ripper trail. Tried to, anyway. They turned before they caught it, headed back to the party for the night. So I spent the next couple of days and nights laying down track after track, staying just ahead of them.”
I noticed how exhausted she looked earlier, but attributed that to whatever it was she did last night-I never considered how little she might have slept in the days leading up to it.
She said, “Couple of times, I thought they was going to hit the ruts this big rig left, and they might have, too, except I finally got them to follow me to the chariot tracks. Not sure if they ever caught that ripper. Big party like that, they probably never even seen him. By the time I got clear of them and found your trail again, took me a good while to catch up to the carnage you left behind. Thought for a flash that war party found you, but if they had, no way you would’ve rolled off. So that was a real mystery.”
I asked, “Did you find bodies?”
She spit some husks out. “Blood, yes, bodies, no. Wouldn’t have been too mysterious a mystery if I’d come across a bunch of bodies. I saw tracks, and found a few weapons, which told me it wasn’t any kind of Grass Dogs you tangled with, but that was it. So I got my pony moving fast as I could until I closed the distance. Found you last night, asleep with a crossbow in your lap. The rest you know. Or not. But can’t say what I can tell you that’ll clear it up any.”
“So… what is it you do exactly? For him, to him?”
Judging by her expression and the way her top lip puffed out as she rolled her tongue behind it, I assume a husk got jammed in the space in her teeth. A second later, it went flying out the back emphatically. I’m not sure if she was more annoyed by my line of questioning or the trapped husk.
“Real hard to put it right,” she said. “Partly, because I don’t know for certain. They say a Memoridon could bore you to tears piling one explanation atop another. Never met one. Probably a good thing, that. But I’ll tell you this much. Men think memories are like murals or statues or objects, all stored in a huge gallery, some kind of collection that captures the truth of whatever happened, never changes none. But that ain’t so. They can capture the untruth of something, just as easy. They can change, especially as time leads to time.”
I said, “That doesn’t really sound… accurate to me, Lloi. What can we trust if not our memories?”
She leaned forward. “Hoping you’d ask. Happens I got an example in mind for you. Let’s say you’re in a town, walking down a busy thoroughfare. You see a woman in front of you, comely, mannered, real nice on the eyes. You’re watching the way her hips tilt this way and that, when all of a sudden, a thug cuts the pouch off her belt and takes off running down the street. She screams ‘thief!’ but nobody stops the wretch in time. Escapes clean. So an hour later, the city watch is asking around, wanting to know if anybody got a solid look at the man. You step forward, you were right there behind when it happened. Three other people step forward, too. And separate, you all describe what you saw. Or think you saw. Thing of it is, the city watch is awful confused, because every single one of you got something different to say. You claim the man was middle height, had brown hair, wearing a green tunic. Somebody else there says he was a tall dusty fairhair with a bluish tunic, and black boots. Another thought he was on the shorter side of things, couldn’t recall the hair, but thought he had a tuft of beard on his chin, brown boots.
“See what I’m getting at? All of you would’ve sworn you saw what you saw, but the cutpursing happened awful quick, and your eyes were fixed on those swaying hips just before, and each of you got a different kind of perspective for the thing. Tall witness might have thought the thug was short, when he might have just been short to him, but middling to you.
“Each account could be different, when each of you saw the single thing. So your memory of the thing would feel true enough to you, but that don’t mean it reflects something real. Maybe one of you in this make believe got it right, maybe none of you did. Hard to say for certain.
“To each man himself, his memories seems as solid and factual as a stone mosaic, an urn he could turn around and heft, a flower he could sniff. But when I go inside another, I don’t see it or feel it like that. Everything is shimmery, shifting, like it’s bathed in mist and shadow, like… like walking down the foggiest street you can think of, with everything looking not like itself at all.
“I can move down those streets, through those dusky galleries, the man with the memories might never know I was there. Even if I move something around, tweak it some, take it like a cutpurse myself, I move unseen. Like a ghost, or time.” She puffed out her cheeks and exhaled. “Like I said, real hard to put words to it and have it make any sort of sense. But with Captain Noose there, it’s a different thing altogether. I go into his memories, I see the same thing I see in anybody’s-shady, funny around the edges, echoes where there ought to be none, things shifting right as I look at them square. Now, I go in after he killed someone dead with that flail of his, and it’s… different. Those stolen memories, they don’t look like his own. Oh, they’re murky, sure enough, and all the rest. But they… leak. Every one of them, puddling something that might as well be poison, which is why I said as much last night. They don’t belong, and I don’t go in and take them out, they continue that bitter leaking until they… well, I can’t say for a surety what would happen. But I got my suspicions. Captain Noose might never wake up, Or if he does, might wake a hollowed-out man, no memories of his own. Maybe none at all. Can’t say.”
She said this with zeal and conviction, but I wasn’t certain I understood. Or believed. “So… are you saying you, uh, retrieve these memories somehow?”
“Yep. That’s right,” she said. “I go in, find them, take them out of him and into me, and then I destroy them. Walking into another’s memories, easy enough, though I don’t always know what I’m seeing there. But taking them gets trickier, and trickier still when they burn to the touch.”
“Was this why you were vomiting? Why he was vomiting?”
She replied, “You’re right quick. Makes you queasy something fierce, having somebody else’s memories inside you, no matter how you want to picture it. Weren’t meant to be there. Torques your stomach five directions at once. I could show you, you like?”
I quickly shook my head.
“Thought not.” She closed her pouch. “Got nothing else to add, just now. So-”
“Lloi,” I interrupted. She looked at me, tired. I didn’t want to press her, but my head was still swarming with questions. “You mentioned the Memoridon. I know little about them, other than the sorts of things everyone hears. They’re memory mages of some kind, right? But-”
“Can’t say I like this wagon none,” she cast a meaningful glance towards the front where Braylar sat unseen, “but I need some more rest, and I won’t be getting none in the saddle, so wagon it is. You grab yourself something to fill your belly, bookmaster, head up on front now. Expect Captain Noose is expecting you, and if ever a man liked to wait less than him, I never met him and hope never to.”
She gave me another long look, and I nodded.
