Realms of Shadow - Lizz Baldwin [59]
It was a giant tortoise, but it had four heads, spaced equally apart around the rim of its shell. The heads, each one independent of the others, could not agree upon the direction in which to travel. It must have managed occasionally to drag itself to a bowl of water near the front of its cage, or it would not have survived in the wizard's absence, but when the original head won out and made for one of the four food dishes in each corner of the cage, the turtle could not reach the food, as the dishes were enclosed behind wire mesh. When the original head made for a different bowl, a head on the side would discover the last bowl and make for it instead. The scene would have been ludicrous had the turtle not been straining so hard against itself, and for so long, that a couple of its legs had scraped themselves raw in its attempts to gain ground.
"I'm trying to cure it," she answered. "I found it like this-"
"Then why not bring its food to it?" The man sprang to do just that but couldn't find a door of any kind in the bars. "Open it!" he commanded.
She did so with a gesture, bemused. The man tore the wire mesh from the food dishes and slid them toward each of the tortoise's four heads. The tortoise choked down the morsels as the man squatted near it, watching.
"I know you can fix this," the man said over his shoulder. "I saw you turn an entire woman into a cow. Why can't you just wave away three of this turtle's… f He stopped. "Unless you did this to it," he whispered. He looked at her. "You didn't find the turtle like this, did you? It was fine when you found it, wasn't it? You took it…"
The druid-wizard didn't like the way this was going. The tortoise was nothing compared to some of her other tenants. She must keep him from seeing the others.
"I did what it's my nature to do," she finished for him, coaxing him to her chambers, holding his eyes with hers. "Surely you knew on some level. The things that give me joy-they aren't joyous things, but I can't help that they bring me joy."
"How could you…? Never mind. What did you really plan to do with the creature we captured? No, never mind that, either."
He paused to think. They had entered her bedchamber, and she eased him down into a chair.
"After your trick with the peddler, I thought…" He trailed off. "But this…"
She let him mull things over without interruption.
After a few moments, he said, "I guess maybe I did know on some level. Maybe that's one of the things that attracted me to you, but that doesn't mean I accept it! I mean, I can find joy in trees, birds, and flowers… Why can't you?"
He had meant the question rhetorically, but she answered anyway. "Because I can't deny what I am."
"But why resign yourself like that? Somehow you had to become what you are. You only need to backtrack to the point where things went wrong…"
She turned his face gently toward her. His eyes ceased wandering about the room and focused on hers.
"It doesn't work that way," she said tenderly.
He looked back into her eyes fully for a moment then wrenched his face from her grasp.
"I have to go," he choked.
He stumbled from the room.
7
"It's inside the walls. It's behind every door until you open it. It's under everything, but, if you look inside everything, you can't see it, because you're always seeing it."
–Chever's last notes
The man fled whence he had come, his vision bleared by tears. When he passed the corridor of horrors, the faces all seemed to rise up in myriad yawning grimaces, crying and moaning, and sometimes screaming.
But the imprisoned creatures made no sound. Those sounds came from him.
He found himself back outside, pant legs splattered in sewage, the light of an overcast afternoon searing his dilated eyes. He jogged blindly, heedless of swamp mud and brambles, until he found himself in a small clearing.