'If you come to the window, and look through the other end, Karsa, you will see things far away drawn closer.'
He scowled at her, and set the instrument down. 'If something is far away, I simply ride closer.'
'And if it is at the top of a cliff? Or a distant enemy encampment and you want to determine the picket lines?'
He retrieved the spyglass and walked over. She moved her chair to one side to give him room. 'There is a falcon's nest on the ledge of that tower, the copper-sheathed one.'
He held up the glass. Searched until he found the nest. 'That is no falcon.'
'You are right. It's a bokh'aral that found the abandoned nest to its liking. It carries up armfuls of rotting fruit and it spends the morning dropping them on people in the streets below.'
'It appears to be snarling…'
'That would be laughter. It is forever driven to bouts of hilarity.'
'Ah – no, that wasn't fruit. It was a brick.'
'Oh, unfortunate. Someone will be sent to kill it, now. After all, only people are allowed to throw bricks at people.'
He lowered the spyglass and studied her. 'That is madness. What manner of laws do you possess, to permit such a thing?'
'Which thing? Stoning people or killing bokh'arala?'
'You are strange, Samar Dev. But then, you are a witch, and a maker of useless objects-'
'Is that spyglass useless?'
'No, I now understand its value. Yet it was lying on a shelf…'
She leaned back. 'I have invented countless things that would prove of great value to many people. And that presents me with a dilemma. I must ask myself, with each invention, what possible abuses await such an object? More often than not, I conclude that those abuses outweigh the value of the invention. I call this Dev's First Law of Invention.'
'You are obsessed with laws.'
'Perhaps. In any case, the law is simple, as all true laws must be-'
'You have a law for that, too?'
'Founding principle, rather than law. In any case, ethics are the first consideration of an inventor following a particular invention.'
'You call that simple?'
'The statement is, the consideration is not.'
'Now that sounds more like a true law.'
She closed her mouth after a moment, then rose and walked over to the scriber's desk, sat and collected a stylus and a wax tablet. 'I distrust philosophy,' she said as she wrote. 'Even so, I will not turn away from the subject… when it slaps me in the face. Nor am I particularly eloquent as a writer. I am better suited to manipulating objects than words. You, on the other hand, seem to possess an unexpected talent for… uh… cogent brevity.'
'You talk too much.'
'No doubt.' She finished recording her own unexpectedly profound words – profound only in that Karsa Orlong had recognized a far vaster application than she had intended. She paused, wanting to dismiss his genius as blind chance, or even the preening false wisdom of savage nobility. But something whispered to her that Karsa Orlong had been underestimated before, and she vowed not to leap into the same pit.
Setting the stylus down, she rose to her feet. 'I am off to examine the demon you killed. Will you accompany me?'
'No, I had a close enough examination the first time.'
She collected the leather satchel containing her surgical instruments.
'Stay inside, please, and try not to break anything.'
'How can you call yourself an inventor if you dislike breaking things?'
At the door, she paused and glanced back at him. His head was brushing the ceiling in this, the highest chamber in her tower. There was something… there in his eyes. 'Try not to break any of my things.'
'Very well. But I am hungry. Bring more food.'
The reptilian corpse was lying on the floor of one of the torture chambers situated in the palace crypts. A retired Avower had been given the task of standing guard. Samar Dev found him asleep in one corner of the room. Leaving him to his snores, she stationed around the huge demon's body the four lit lanterns she had brought down from above, then settled onto her knees and untied the flap of her satchel, withdrawing a variety of polished surgical instruments. And, finally, her preparations complete, she swung her attention to the corpse.
Teeth, jaws, forward-facing eyes, all the makings of a superior carnivore, likely an ambush hunter. Yet, this was no simple river lizard. Behind the orbital ridges the skull swept out broad and long, with massive occipital bulges, the sheer mass of the cranial region implying intelligence. Unless, of course, the bone was absurdly thick.
She cut away the torn and bruised skin to reveal broken fragments of that skull. Not so thick, then. Indentations made it obvious that Karsa Orlong had used his fists. In which, it was clear, there was astonishing strength, and an equally astonishing will. The brain beneath, marred with broken vessels and blood leakage and pulped in places by the skull pieces, was indeed large, although arranged in a markedly different manner from a human's. There were more lobes, for one thing. Six more, in all, positioned beneath heavy ridged projections out to the sides, including two extra vessel-packed masses connected by tissue to the eyes. Suggesting these demons saw a different world, a more complete one, perhaps.
Samar extracted one mangled eye and was surprised to find two lenses, one concave, the other convex. She set those aside for later examination.
Cutting through the tough, scaled hide, she opened the neck regions, confirming the oversized veins and arteries necessary to feed an active brain, then continued on to reveal the chest region. Many of the ribs were already broken. She counted four lungs and two protolungs attached beneath them, these latter ones saturated with blood.
She cut through the lining of the first of three stomachs, then moved quickly back as the acids poured out. The blade of her knife sizzled and she watched as pitting etched into the iron surface. More hissing sounds, from the stone floor. Her eyes began watering.
Movement from the stomach, and Samar rose and took a step back. Worms were crawling out. A score, wriggling then dropping to the muddy stone. The colour of blued iron, segmented, each as long as an index finger. She glanced down at the crumbling knife in her hand and dropped the instrument, then collected wooden tongs from her satchel, moved to the edge of the acid pool, reached down and retrieved one of the worms.
Not a worm. Hundreds of legs, strangely finned, and, even more surprising, the creatures were mechanisms. Not living at all, the metal of their bodies somehow impervious to the acids. The thing twisted about in the grip of the tongs, then stopped moving. She shook it, but it had gone immobile, like a crooked nail. An infestation? She did not think so. No, there were many creatures that worked in concert. The pond of stomach acid had been home to these mechanisms, and they in turn worked in some fashion to the demon's benefit.
A hacking cough startled her, and she turned to see the Avower stumble to his feet. Hunched, twisted with arthritis, he shambled over. 'Samar Dev, the witch! What's that smell? Not you, I hope. You and me, we're the same sort, aren't we just?'
'We are?'
'Oh yes, Samar Dev.' He scratched at his crotch. 'We strip the layers of humanity, down to the very bones, but where does humanity end and animal begin? When does pain defeat reason? Where hides the soul and to where does it flee when all hope in the flesh is lost? Questions to ponder, for such as you and me. Oh how I have longed to meet you, to share knowledge-'
'You're a torturer.'
'Someone has to be,' he said, offended. 'In a culture that admits the need for torture, there must perforce be a torturer. A culture, Samar Dev, that values the acquisition of truths more than it does any single human life. Do you
