signy1
in
tinman_fic
To Me A Kingdom, 6/?
Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: DG, Azkadellia, Cain, Glitch/Ambrose, OCs
Pairing: none
Warning: Some adult language, descriptions of drug use and torture
Summary: Azkadellia sheds some light on the mysterious drug Glitch has been using, and she and Cain have a heart-to-heart. Some Glitch backstory.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my property.
Notes: I’ve been sticking pretty close to Baum’s work for my myths and naming practices; I made an exception here. The name ‘Narr’ is Yiddish for ‘fool,’ the kind who can start things without ever meaning to. There’s an expression-‘Against a narr, even the Lord is helpless.’ This one sure did.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
DG doubted that Ahamo would know anything about Outer Zone drugs. And she didn’t want to ask her mother, either; she just couldn’t imagine the conversation going well. Tutor was a possibility, but he wasn’t in the palace at that moment; he was at the newly reopened University teaching a class that evening. Probably telling his students to concentrate.
That left Azkadellia. While Cain was putting Glitch to bed in a room that looked as though he hadn’t been in it for months, DG ran hell-for-leather through the corridors until she found her sister. “Az, I need your help,” she gasped.
DG’s fear was contagious. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Glitch,” she said. “He was passed out in his lab. And we think he took something, some kind of drug-oh, come quick. Cain didn’t recognize it.”
Az dropped her book, seized her sister’s hand. “Let’s go.”
Cain hadn’t bothered looking for pajamas. He’d simply removed the still-unconscious Glitch’s boots and jacket, then covered him up with a blanket and tried to think of something to do next. If that swamp-water in the green bottle was simply some obscure form of liquor, there really wasn’t anything to do except maybe rustle up some willowbark extract and wait for the hangover to teach its lesson. If it was poison, they had a frantic search for a medic in front of them-and no chance of keeping this quiet, either. He didn’t know what else it might be; if it was a bliss-drug, it wasn’t one he’d ever heard of-and he’d heard of most of them. And where the hell had he gotten the stuff, anyway?
Two pairs of feet pounding down the corridor cut off that train of thought.
“Did he wake up yet?” DG asked.
Cain shook his head. “Still out,” he said. He picked up the green bottle, held it out to Azkadellia. “Princess, this is the stuff I think he was drinking-is it magic? It’s no drug I know.”
Az took the bottle, pulled out the stopper. She sniffed it, and the strain in her face relaxed minutely. “It’s not poisonous,” she said. “It’s a potion made from ten-leafed clover. Very rare, and very illegal. But it’s not… physically dangerous.”
“Where’d he get it?” Cain wondered aloud. “I can’t imagine he could find a pusher for that stuff on any street corner…”
“No,” Az agreed. “The clovers have been outlawed for centuries. I doubt anyone outside the royal family even remembers why. And I know the recipe for this particular infusion is a state secret.”
“Why?” DG asked. “What is it?”
Az held the bottle to the light, frowned at the level in the bottle. “It gives a non-Viewer the ability to See as they do. Temporary psychic abilities. I don’t know why he would have…”
“Ambrose,” DG blurted out. She stopped, blinked. “He’s using it to hook himself up with Ambrose,” she repeated, her certainty growing by the second.
“He’s what?” said Cain.
“He takes the clover stuff to get powers like Raw’s,” she said slowly, working it out as she went. “Once it kicks in, he mentally links himself to the other half of his brain, and invents stuff as fast as he can, then sleeps it off for a while…”
“And does it all over again,” Cain finished.
DG, for proof, picked up the drawing he’d apparently been working on when he’d collapsed, showed it to the others. It was complicated, and she wasn’t sure she was holding it the right way up, but the notes crowded in the margins seemed to imply that it was intended to extract nutrients from inedible substances. Bone and hides, grasses and chaff, even some minerals and clays-there were a great many formulae and equations scrawled on the back, and she couldn’t begin to understand them. But the purpose of the machine seemed clear enough, and the tablets that seemed to be the end product, she thought, though they would never be mistaken for gourmet cuisine, would do rather a lot towards staving off starvation.
Azkadellia looked at it, and thought about the farmers in the Ugabu region, the ones she had taxed into near-destruction. This was her miracle, she thought dimly. Ambrose had achieved her miracle after all.
She looked at the wasted figure on the bed, and tried to weigh a million starving innocents against one tortured genius slowly crucifying himself in a cellar and come up with an answer she liked.
Cain took the paper and stared at it for a moment. “Right. You need to get your folks in here. Kid, you go find them, all right?” His voice was crisp, authoritative-and exactly what DG needed to hear. She nodded once, then turned on her heel and ran.
“And Princess,” he continued. “About this clover potion. You said it wasn’t physically dangerous. What sort of dangerous is it, then? Is it addictive?”
“I don’t know,” she faltered. “I never tried it myself. I… I did force some people to take it… whenever I’d killed too many captive Viewers,” she admitted, waiting for the disgust to cross his face.
It didn’t. “Figured as much,” Cain nodded. “Sounds like something the Witch would have done once she had access to the stuff. So how did they respond?”
“It drove some of them mad,” she said evenly. “Many of them committed suicide. Viewers have a lifetime to learn to refine and control their abilities; ten-leafed clover bestows it all at once, on unprepared minds. Even the ones who survived the first session usually broke down during the second.”
They both looked at the bottle. “That was full when he got hold of it, right?”
“It would have to have been.”
“Dosage size?” Unspoken was the real question-how long has he been at this?
Azkadellia swallowed hard. “Three drops.” Months.
Cain’s eyebrows climbed for his hairline. “Hmm.”
“This is my fault,” she murmured.
Cain heard, and surprised her once more. “No it isn’t,” he said brusquely. “And this isn’t the time or place. Pull yourself together.”
She blinked, stunned. Nobody-nobody-talked to her like that. She wanted to argue with him, make him realize exactly what she was. Maybe he read that in her eyes.
“If you want to spend the rest of your life blaming yourself for being a victim, that’s your prerogative, I guess,” he said coolly. “Though I don’t recommend it. Right now I’d say he’s a higher priority-him and that machine of his. If it’s for real, we needed it yesterday, and no mistake. You can either do the job in front of you and make life better for your people, or you can sit around feeling sorry for yourself. And I’ll say this much-whatever else you are or aren’t, you’re the princess. Act like it.”
The silence that filled the room was terrible, and it lasted for what seemed like a very long time. Cain, as surprised as Azkadellia at the words that had come out of his mouth, just shrugged slightly and maintained a poker face. Azkadellia herself looked stricken, then expressionless.
A part of Cain’s mind he didn’t usually admit to having took the opportunity to quip, Well, it wasn’t as though you really enjoyed running the Tin Men, right?
“You’re right,” she said eventually. She nodded towards the schematic. “Tutor is at the University today, and if another technologist capable of following one of Ambrose’s inventions exists, that’s doubtlessly the place to find him. I’ll send a message to Tutor immediately.” She turned to go.
“Princess,” Cain started, then stopped. He wasn’t entirely sure what to say next. “When do you think he’ll come out of it?” he improvised.
“How should I know?” Azkadellia spat. “Do you think I sat by their bedsides, holding their hands, waiting for my victims to recover? Does that sound like something I would have done?”
“That doesn’t sound like something the Witch would have done, no,” Cain said very deliberately. “But you said this stuff is a state secret. That makes you-and I guess your mother-the closest things to experts we’ve got.” He shrugged. “It’s not important. But come back as quick as you can, anyway; when he wakes up, he’ll want to see you.”
She laughed, one bitter peal. “I doubt that.”
“I don’t,” Cain shot back. “You send that message, and then you get yourself back in here where you belong. From what I hear, you’re like family to him. He’ll want to see you..”
“If that’s true, it only proves that I cut out more of his brain than any of us realized,” she hurled over her shoulder as she went out the door. The anger in her voice wasn’t intended for him.
Cain huffed a frustrated, indignant breath, still spoiling for the fight she had cut short. “Well,” he told Glitch, “At least she finally said it out loud, instead of just thinking it to herself. It’s a start, anyhow.” He folded his arms. “And you’re just as bad as she is.”
Glitch, meanwhile, dreamed.
“Hey, Roq-get a load of this one,” called a young Longcoat guard, whose name was Narr. “Look at that-he’s got a glitch in his works somewhere.”
His partner, Roq, glanced into the indicated cell. ‘A glitch’ was putting it mildly. The prisoner was lying on the floor, all his muscles spasming in what looked like an uncontrolled and probably painful fashion. “Oh, him,” he said dismissively. “Some bigwig. Nothing to worry about.”
Narr didn’t look worried; he looked fascinated. “Yeah, but what the hell’s wrong with him?” He snickered as the prisoner’s left leg kicked the air a few times.
“Head case,” Roq said laconically.
“You’re shittin’ me,” Narr said skeptically. He was new, and had grown wary of the pranks perpetrated on new recruits. “I’ve seen head cases; they just go quiet. That one’s practically doing a dance.”
“Some of them it takes that way,” Roq said dismissively. “The more brain they take, the worse the mess they leave behind.”
Narr raised an eyebrow. “Huh. What’s his name?”
Roq shrugged. “You’re the one that cares; name him yourself,” he said, walking away. Narr hurried to catch up.
In fact, most of the guards nicknamed the various prisoners; the impulse to name things is fairly universal, and the Witch knew that depriving a man of his name went a long way towards depriving him of his identity, and from there to depriving him of his humanity. A once-dignified shapeshifter three corridors away grew used to being called Fido, or Wuffles, or Frisky. General Jinjur, a brilliant military strategist who had been integral in winning the last major war, in Azkadellia’s great-grandmother’s day, got used to being called ‘Grammy.’
The head case in cell 42610 was relatively lucky. Narr’s choice of nickname-Glitch-was the one that caught on. Granted, in the world outside the dungeons-a world the prisoners sometimes almost forgot existed-that might not have seemed particularly lucky. However, given that the runner-up nickname was the less-than-elegant ‘Dumb-shit,’ he’d have counted his blessings if he remembered how.
Narr did him another favor; as a general rule, once political prisoners had been drained of useful intelligence-and it was hard to imagine anyone more drained than the newly christened Glitch, who was still a twitching, semi-comatose, unresponsive wreck-they were considered disposable. Narr’s superiors, however, for reasons of their own, issued orders that 42610 was to be kept alive. Resentful but obedient, Narr spent what seemed like an unconscionable amount of his time siphoning gruel into him.
He eventually lost his temper. One day, after Glitch had let the greasy swill dribble out of his mouth just that one time too often, Narr had taken hold of the curly hair-already matted into impenetrability-and shoved the man’s face into the food trough. “Eat, you dumb fuck,” he’d snarled. “Eat it or drown in it already!”
Narr was frustrated beyond measure, but not quite beyond reason, and he was well aware that if his charge died at his hands, he’d end up warming the vacant cell. If he was lucky. No, he’d had every intention of letting him up before he actually drowned.
What happened instead was a surprise to all concerned; Glitch lashed out, with one smooth motion jabbing his right elbow into Narr’s unprotected gut, then snapping his fist upwards to land a solid blow to Narr’s jaw.
It was the first coordinated movement he’d made since the extraction. When Narr caught his breath sufficiently to take an interest in his surroundings, he saw Glitch staring directly at him. His eyes shone with the desperate glare of a trapped beast, but they were undeniably focused. Also a first. If Glitch had been capable of thought at that moment, he would probably have thought it well worth the vicious retaliatory beating that followed.
Learning to use his body again had-literally-been torture. Learning to use his mind had been sheer hell. But he’d done it. He’d done it once, and by all the gods in the heavens and by all the devils in hell, too, he would have the rest of his mind back or die trying. Ambrose, fading fast as the drug left his system, called back one cryptic phrase as he was dragged back into the darkness, but Glitch, slipping fast and faster into the dreamless, lonely oblivion the drug left in its wake, couldn’t hear.
He tried to claw his way back to where Ambrose waited, but the ground beneath his dream-self crumbled beneath his grasping fingers, and he fell.
Author: Signy
Characters: DG, Azkadellia, Cain, Glitch/Ambrose, OCs
Pairing: none
Warning: Some adult language, descriptions of drug use and torture
Summary: Azkadellia sheds some light on the mysterious drug Glitch has been using, and she and Cain have a heart-to-heart. Some Glitch backstory.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my property.
Notes: I’ve been sticking pretty close to Baum’s work for my myths and naming practices; I made an exception here. The name ‘Narr’ is Yiddish for ‘fool,’ the kind who can start things without ever meaning to. There’s an expression-‘Against a narr, even the Lord is helpless.’ This one sure did.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
DG doubted that Ahamo would know anything about Outer Zone drugs. And she didn’t want to ask her mother, either; she just couldn’t imagine the conversation going well. Tutor was a possibility, but he wasn’t in the palace at that moment; he was at the newly reopened University teaching a class that evening. Probably telling his students to concentrate.
That left Azkadellia. While Cain was putting Glitch to bed in a room that looked as though he hadn’t been in it for months, DG ran hell-for-leather through the corridors until she found her sister. “Az, I need your help,” she gasped.
DG’s fear was contagious. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Glitch,” she said. “He was passed out in his lab. And we think he took something, some kind of drug-oh, come quick. Cain didn’t recognize it.”
Az dropped her book, seized her sister’s hand. “Let’s go.”
Cain hadn’t bothered looking for pajamas. He’d simply removed the still-unconscious Glitch’s boots and jacket, then covered him up with a blanket and tried to think of something to do next. If that swamp-water in the green bottle was simply some obscure form of liquor, there really wasn’t anything to do except maybe rustle up some willowbark extract and wait for the hangover to teach its lesson. If it was poison, they had a frantic search for a medic in front of them-and no chance of keeping this quiet, either. He didn’t know what else it might be; if it was a bliss-drug, it wasn’t one he’d ever heard of-and he’d heard of most of them. And where the hell had he gotten the stuff, anyway?
Two pairs of feet pounding down the corridor cut off that train of thought.
“Did he wake up yet?” DG asked.
Cain shook his head. “Still out,” he said. He picked up the green bottle, held it out to Azkadellia. “Princess, this is the stuff I think he was drinking-is it magic? It’s no drug I know.”
Az took the bottle, pulled out the stopper. She sniffed it, and the strain in her face relaxed minutely. “It’s not poisonous,” she said. “It’s a potion made from ten-leafed clover. Very rare, and very illegal. But it’s not… physically dangerous.”
“Where’d he get it?” Cain wondered aloud. “I can’t imagine he could find a pusher for that stuff on any street corner…”
“No,” Az agreed. “The clovers have been outlawed for centuries. I doubt anyone outside the royal family even remembers why. And I know the recipe for this particular infusion is a state secret.”
“Why?” DG asked. “What is it?”
Az held the bottle to the light, frowned at the level in the bottle. “It gives a non-Viewer the ability to See as they do. Temporary psychic abilities. I don’t know why he would have…”
“Ambrose,” DG blurted out. She stopped, blinked. “He’s using it to hook himself up with Ambrose,” she repeated, her certainty growing by the second.
“He’s what?” said Cain.
“He takes the clover stuff to get powers like Raw’s,” she said slowly, working it out as she went. “Once it kicks in, he mentally links himself to the other half of his brain, and invents stuff as fast as he can, then sleeps it off for a while…”
“And does it all over again,” Cain finished.
DG, for proof, picked up the drawing he’d apparently been working on when he’d collapsed, showed it to the others. It was complicated, and she wasn’t sure she was holding it the right way up, but the notes crowded in the margins seemed to imply that it was intended to extract nutrients from inedible substances. Bone and hides, grasses and chaff, even some minerals and clays-there were a great many formulae and equations scrawled on the back, and she couldn’t begin to understand them. But the purpose of the machine seemed clear enough, and the tablets that seemed to be the end product, she thought, though they would never be mistaken for gourmet cuisine, would do rather a lot towards staving off starvation.
Azkadellia looked at it, and thought about the farmers in the Ugabu region, the ones she had taxed into near-destruction. This was her miracle, she thought dimly. Ambrose had achieved her miracle after all.
She looked at the wasted figure on the bed, and tried to weigh a million starving innocents against one tortured genius slowly crucifying himself in a cellar and come up with an answer she liked.
Cain took the paper and stared at it for a moment. “Right. You need to get your folks in here. Kid, you go find them, all right?” His voice was crisp, authoritative-and exactly what DG needed to hear. She nodded once, then turned on her heel and ran.
“And Princess,” he continued. “About this clover potion. You said it wasn’t physically dangerous. What sort of dangerous is it, then? Is it addictive?”
“I don’t know,” she faltered. “I never tried it myself. I… I did force some people to take it… whenever I’d killed too many captive Viewers,” she admitted, waiting for the disgust to cross his face.
It didn’t. “Figured as much,” Cain nodded. “Sounds like something the Witch would have done once she had access to the stuff. So how did they respond?”
“It drove some of them mad,” she said evenly. “Many of them committed suicide. Viewers have a lifetime to learn to refine and control their abilities; ten-leafed clover bestows it all at once, on unprepared minds. Even the ones who survived the first session usually broke down during the second.”
They both looked at the bottle. “That was full when he got hold of it, right?”
“It would have to have been.”
“Dosage size?” Unspoken was the real question-how long has he been at this?
Azkadellia swallowed hard. “Three drops.” Months.
Cain’s eyebrows climbed for his hairline. “Hmm.”
“This is my fault,” she murmured.
Cain heard, and surprised her once more. “No it isn’t,” he said brusquely. “And this isn’t the time or place. Pull yourself together.”
She blinked, stunned. Nobody-nobody-talked to her like that. She wanted to argue with him, make him realize exactly what she was. Maybe he read that in her eyes.
“If you want to spend the rest of your life blaming yourself for being a victim, that’s your prerogative, I guess,” he said coolly. “Though I don’t recommend it. Right now I’d say he’s a higher priority-him and that machine of his. If it’s for real, we needed it yesterday, and no mistake. You can either do the job in front of you and make life better for your people, or you can sit around feeling sorry for yourself. And I’ll say this much-whatever else you are or aren’t, you’re the princess. Act like it.”
The silence that filled the room was terrible, and it lasted for what seemed like a very long time. Cain, as surprised as Azkadellia at the words that had come out of his mouth, just shrugged slightly and maintained a poker face. Azkadellia herself looked stricken, then expressionless.
A part of Cain’s mind he didn’t usually admit to having took the opportunity to quip, Well, it wasn’t as though you really enjoyed running the Tin Men, right?
“You’re right,” she said eventually. She nodded towards the schematic. “Tutor is at the University today, and if another technologist capable of following one of Ambrose’s inventions exists, that’s doubtlessly the place to find him. I’ll send a message to Tutor immediately.” She turned to go.
“Princess,” Cain started, then stopped. He wasn’t entirely sure what to say next. “When do you think he’ll come out of it?” he improvised.
“How should I know?” Azkadellia spat. “Do you think I sat by their bedsides, holding their hands, waiting for my victims to recover? Does that sound like something I would have done?”
“That doesn’t sound like something the Witch would have done, no,” Cain said very deliberately. “But you said this stuff is a state secret. That makes you-and I guess your mother-the closest things to experts we’ve got.” He shrugged. “It’s not important. But come back as quick as you can, anyway; when he wakes up, he’ll want to see you.”
She laughed, one bitter peal. “I doubt that.”
“I don’t,” Cain shot back. “You send that message, and then you get yourself back in here where you belong. From what I hear, you’re like family to him. He’ll want to see you..”
“If that’s true, it only proves that I cut out more of his brain than any of us realized,” she hurled over her shoulder as she went out the door. The anger in her voice wasn’t intended for him.
Cain huffed a frustrated, indignant breath, still spoiling for the fight she had cut short. “Well,” he told Glitch, “At least she finally said it out loud, instead of just thinking it to herself. It’s a start, anyhow.” He folded his arms. “And you’re just as bad as she is.”
Glitch, meanwhile, dreamed.
“Hey, Roq-get a load of this one,” called a young Longcoat guard, whose name was Narr. “Look at that-he’s got a glitch in his works somewhere.”
His partner, Roq, glanced into the indicated cell. ‘A glitch’ was putting it mildly. The prisoner was lying on the floor, all his muscles spasming in what looked like an uncontrolled and probably painful fashion. “Oh, him,” he said dismissively. “Some bigwig. Nothing to worry about.”
Narr didn’t look worried; he looked fascinated. “Yeah, but what the hell’s wrong with him?” He snickered as the prisoner’s left leg kicked the air a few times.
“Head case,” Roq said laconically.
“You’re shittin’ me,” Narr said skeptically. He was new, and had grown wary of the pranks perpetrated on new recruits. “I’ve seen head cases; they just go quiet. That one’s practically doing a dance.”
“Some of them it takes that way,” Roq said dismissively. “The more brain they take, the worse the mess they leave behind.”
Narr raised an eyebrow. “Huh. What’s his name?”
Roq shrugged. “You’re the one that cares; name him yourself,” he said, walking away. Narr hurried to catch up.
In fact, most of the guards nicknamed the various prisoners; the impulse to name things is fairly universal, and the Witch knew that depriving a man of his name went a long way towards depriving him of his identity, and from there to depriving him of his humanity. A once-dignified shapeshifter three corridors away grew used to being called Fido, or Wuffles, or Frisky. General Jinjur, a brilliant military strategist who had been integral in winning the last major war, in Azkadellia’s great-grandmother’s day, got used to being called ‘Grammy.’
The head case in cell 42610 was relatively lucky. Narr’s choice of nickname-Glitch-was the one that caught on. Granted, in the world outside the dungeons-a world the prisoners sometimes almost forgot existed-that might not have seemed particularly lucky. However, given that the runner-up nickname was the less-than-elegant ‘Dumb-shit,’ he’d have counted his blessings if he remembered how.
Narr did him another favor; as a general rule, once political prisoners had been drained of useful intelligence-and it was hard to imagine anyone more drained than the newly christened Glitch, who was still a twitching, semi-comatose, unresponsive wreck-they were considered disposable. Narr’s superiors, however, for reasons of their own, issued orders that 42610 was to be kept alive. Resentful but obedient, Narr spent what seemed like an unconscionable amount of his time siphoning gruel into him.
He eventually lost his temper. One day, after Glitch had let the greasy swill dribble out of his mouth just that one time too often, Narr had taken hold of the curly hair-already matted into impenetrability-and shoved the man’s face into the food trough. “Eat, you dumb fuck,” he’d snarled. “Eat it or drown in it already!”
Narr was frustrated beyond measure, but not quite beyond reason, and he was well aware that if his charge died at his hands, he’d end up warming the vacant cell. If he was lucky. No, he’d had every intention of letting him up before he actually drowned.
What happened instead was a surprise to all concerned; Glitch lashed out, with one smooth motion jabbing his right elbow into Narr’s unprotected gut, then snapping his fist upwards to land a solid blow to Narr’s jaw.
It was the first coordinated movement he’d made since the extraction. When Narr caught his breath sufficiently to take an interest in his surroundings, he saw Glitch staring directly at him. His eyes shone with the desperate glare of a trapped beast, but they were undeniably focused. Also a first. If Glitch had been capable of thought at that moment, he would probably have thought it well worth the vicious retaliatory beating that followed.
Learning to use his body again had-literally-been torture. Learning to use his mind had been sheer hell. But he’d done it. He’d done it once, and by all the gods in the heavens and by all the devils in hell, too, he would have the rest of his mind back or die trying. Ambrose, fading fast as the drug left his system, called back one cryptic phrase as he was dragged back into the darkness, but Glitch, slipping fast and faster into the dreamless, lonely oblivion the drug left in its wake, couldn’t hear.
He tried to claw his way back to where Ambrose waited, but the ground beneath his dream-self crumbled beneath his grasping fingers, and he fell.