Azure bonds - Kate Novak [122]
"I don't belie-" Alias began, but the serpent notion sank its fangs deep into her heart. Beneath the mossy blankets her branded sword arm responded with a sympathetic ache.
"Yes, you do believe me" Moander insisted. "Now that I have told you, you cannot resist the truth. Golem. Homonculous. Simulacrum. Clone. Automaton. All these things come close to describing what you are. But not completely. You are a new thing, for the moment unique. A fake human, but to all appearances the real thing. You are an abomination cloaked in the manner and dress of the everyday."
As a mage and scholar, Akabar would no doubt have recognized the words Moander used to describe her, but to Alias most of them were gibberish. She had a notion they involved arcane rituals of the type that made her not only non-born, but inhuman as well.
"Now, know this," it demanded. "Your spirit is enslaved in the prison of that body, and that body is a puppet. A puppet made of meat, you might say, in much the same way as is the body I use to speak with you." To dramatize its point, Moander lifted Akabar's elbow into the air, leaving his forearm and hand to droop, and slouching his other shoulder downward so he resembled a marionette supported only by a single invisible thread.
Alias's mouth opened and closed, but she could think of no retort. Moander continued its lecture without acknowledging her distress.
"Now, golems and automatons follow a set pattern, invested into their make-up at their creation. These patterns are usually very rigid, no more complicated than 'guard this room,' or 'kill the first man to enter.' Useless rot, entirely too limited. No creativity or resourcefulness or initiative.
"But you," his tone lowered with pride, "you were built differently. It took many hands to create you. My followers allied with mages, thieves and assassins, a daemon of great power, and… well, the other hardly matters. With your deceptive appearance you can allay suspicion and travel at will until you have fulfilled your patterns-traveled all the paths set before you."
"Paths?" said Alias. Her chest felt tight, as though she were being crushed by the mad god's words. Each claim it made struck a resonant chord inside her, leaving her unable to deny what the god said. She choked back her screams, determined not to show this monster her helpless rage.
"Yes, paths or patterns, whose eventual outcome will be the accomplishment of some goal set by each of your makers. Rather than simply issue you some rigid order, we set you on a course whereupon you would achieve these goals without knowing what they were, or even, once they were achieved, that you had done so. You could commit theft, espionage, sabotage, murder, and never know why or for whom, not always remembering, other times believing it to have been your own idea."
They've made me a damned thing, Alias thought, like the bowl that carries poison or the sword that deals a death blow. She pressed her nails into her palms and once again began breathing too fast.
"The goal set for you by my last few followers was to seek my prison and release my Abomination form so that my spirit could return to this world It was my life energy, summoned and collected by my followers, that brought you to life, you see, so that you, the non-born child, could free me."
"I'm not a child," Alias snapped.
"But, of course vou are. It was the first day of Mirtul when my followers summoned my life energy and you began breathing. Only a month and a few days. So you see, vou are but a child. Yet even so, you are my greatest servant, mv liberator, an honor many before you have died for.
"At first, when the lizard arrived, I nearly perished with despair. (Well, not really, just a figure of speech.) When I saw his markings and sensed his determination to pass through the wall, I thought he was you. I sucked his life energy nearly dry trying to pull him through the wall. But I suppose being hatched counted as being born to the