The Silenced Tale, стр. 102
I know already. I know. We are losing him. He will not live.
“We are not stupid, vapid, screaming fangirls!” Ahbni is still screeching, near-incomprehensible through her fury. “We are not here to boggle young nerds and trick them into falling in love with us! We are not in costumes just to get your attention, and if some of us want to dress sexy, well then, we can! It makes us feel powerful, so fuck you for trying to prude- and slut-shame us all at once! Fangirls are legion. Fangirls are powerful! And screw you for telling anyone, least of all us, otherwise! How dare you take my money and then spit in my face?”
“Jesus, Kin, get her under control!” Pip snarls at my brother, and Kintyre shakes himself out of his horrified gawping. He swings his big, meaty arms around Ahbni’s elbows and across her stomach, pinning her to his chest and lifting her off the floor.
“I hate you!” Ahbni screams, and in her hand, the bloody dagger quivers, splattering the floor. “I hate everything about you!”
“That’s no reason to stab him!” Pip shouts up at her.
“Isn’t it? Violence is the only language idiots like him speak! This is me, punching up!”
“Violence is never the only recourse!” Pip growls. And then suddenly, she sits up straight, looking Ahbni dead in the eye. “Where are you from?” Pip asks, her voice shaking, a non sequitur as my wife leaps in her usual fashion to a conclusion that is just beginning to become clear to me. “Where do you live?”
Her face filled with triumph, Ahbni hisses: “Detroit.”
All at once, the niggling at the back of my head settles. The truth comes clear.
Too late. Oh, too late, Forsyth, you utter useless fool!
“The troll was you. All this time, it was you. Your new ga-gaming p-p-partner . . . n-n-no. You—” I choke, having trouble speaking around my own self-recrimination.
“You . . . you brought him here. How could you?” Pip challenges, staring at Ahbni with horror and regret, both. Blood drips from the tips of her fingers, splashes against the floor. “Your eyes aren’t even green. How could you choose this?”
Ahbni grins, triumphant. “I’ve done what no one else could! I’ve silenced a monster!”
“He’s getting better!” Pip screams, cradling Elgar’s body. “He’s growing! He’s trying! You can’t just—just—execute people who don’t think like you! You can’t—”
“And I’ll be rewarded for it!” Ahbni shouts.
“By him?” Kintyre snarls, tightening his hold. His biceps strain against his shirt as Ahbni writhes, feet flailing in the air to no avail. “Are you stupid?”
“I’m not stupid!” Ahbni protests, her pride pricked.
“You’ve gotta be!” Pip seethes. “You don’t think there are any corpses in the rubble upstairs? You don’t think that he intends to kill every single person in this building? Really? You don’t think we’re all next? That the Viceroy isn’t out to kill all of us? It’s what he does. He won’t stop until he’s laid waste to this entire building and everyone in it. He’s a sick, sadistic fuck.”
“But that’s not . . . that’s not what he . . .” She blinks, and swallows hard, eyes darting around the room. Her shock is real, I think, and not an act.
“You didn’t put two and two together?” Pip asks. “It’s in the books!”
“Well, I’ve never read them closely!” Ahbni protests.
“But you know you hate them all the same,” Pip hisses. “How can you claim to critique if you’re only reading for what will support your—?”
“He said that—”
“Not the point right now!” Kintyre snarls. “Help the Writer.”
“It pierced his lung, I think,” Bevel says, his voice shaky in a way that I’ve never heard from my brother-in-law before.
“For fuck’s sake, Forsyth, stop standing there!” Pip snaps at me.
Am I just standing here?
I am.
My feet don’t seem to be moving, even though I command them to do so. My hands twitch at my sides, as if I am already pressing them to the wound to aid Bevel, but they are not on Elgar’s body. They are not dipped in the blood of the man who invented me. My breath comes shallow and sharp. Swollen with grief, a hot fist of anger and surprise, my heart is struggling to pump blood through the constriction of seized terror that afflicts my veins. I try to speak, try to lick my lips, try to anything, and the most I can do is blink mechanically and let my mouth flop open, let out a harsh, low “haaaaa” sound that wavers and stumbles as I run out of breath.
The look on my creator’s face might have been comical if it weren’t so horrifying. Slack jaw, wide eyes, surprise and pain pinching the sides of his mouth white and thin. He is propped on his side, Pip and I before him, Pip pressing her knees into his belly to give Bevel leverage, and Bevel behind, jamming his increasingly red-soaked robe against Elgar’s back.
“Forsyth, please,” Pip sobs, face upturned and pale with her own grief, cheeks wet with her own terror. “Do something.”
The “please” is what knocks me back into my own body, into the moment, and I drop to my knees beside Elgar. I fear—I expect him to be dead already, but Elgar blinks up at me, smiling dopily through what must be his unbelievable agony.
“Hi,” he chokes, a bubble of red spittle popping with the vowel.
“Hush,” I say to him, and then, one hand laced tightly with Pip’s free one so I can draw upon her magic, I recite all the Words of Healing to which I am privy.
“It’s too deep,” Bevel grits out in a whisper, his voice tight. When I look up at him, I see sweat beading across his forehead. The tendons of his