Tallah

“Stop! What are you doing?”

Vergil tried to squirm out of the sorceress’ grip but she had his arm painfully twisted around and had forced him face down on a table. Her strength was truly monstrous in comparison to her stature.

“This would be painless if you were more cooperative,” she commented, a slight edge of annoyance in her voice.

Sil paid them no attention from where she worked so no help would be forthcoming from there. She was watching a flask come to a boil above some kind of burner. A caramel covered pastry lay half-eaten on a plate next to her.

“I’ve already told you I’m cooperating. You don’t need to put that on me.” Vergil groaned in pain, his voice muffled by a stack of papers pressed against his face. “Stop already. Please.”

He felt a pinprick at the back of his head, followed by a sharp, stinging pain that mellowed into a slight pinching pressure. The grip on his arm slackened and went away.

“See?” she said, pushing him away from her table. “That wasn’t so bad. All that fuss for nothing.”

Vergil salt bolt upright and immediately palmed at the back of his head. The thing she’d put on him bit his fingers with a jolt of electricity.

You have equipped a magical item: SILESTRA ADANA’s BINDING STUD.

You have been electrocuted and your right hand is now afflicted by PARTIAL PARALYSIS.

He ignored the messages.

She had put a smooth, perfectly round crystal stud on the back of his head. It dug into his skin with needle-like clamps, and caused a blinding headache.

The crystal’s twin was on a silver armband on Tallah’s wrist. Sil had called that a special limiter and warned the sorceress about abusing it. Shattering that one would trigger its twin.

“Why?” he asked, blinking back tears. He tried to massage feeling back into his right hand. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

Tallah, for that’s how Sil always addressed her in spite of the initial warning, returned to the work of translating some large tome covered in symbols that kept shifting in Vergil’s eyes. It was what she did most days, cooped up in the room with her books and her translations. He had tried to peek once but she shooed him away.

“It’s a leash.” Sil explained absentmindedly while Vergil tried to get a glimpse of it a mirror. “I wouldn’t touch it again if I were you. I’ve built it so that it gives a nasty shock to whoever tries to remove it. If you get further than, hmm, about a kilometre from Tallah, it will detonate and take your head off.” She looked back at him over the rim of her boiling flask. “It’ll hurt like you wouldn’t want to imagine. Be a good boy and keep close. All right?”

“But why?” he asked again, a slight whine in his voice. “Where would I go? I’ve got nowhere to be. My only friends are dead. I’m penniless and, as you said, considered dead. I either stay with you or I freeze to death out in the streets.”

Sil shrugged.

“All the same. Go watch the snow or something. We’re working.”

She dismissed him from the room with a wave of her hand, like always, as if he were a bothersome child.

Both she and Tallah had interrogated him relentlessly for the better part of the tenday, going so far as to wake him from his fitful bouts of sleep whenever they felt they needed clarification on some point or another.

She would call him back when she’d need him again, though in the last two days that had become increasingly rare.

Whatever information he could provide from his world had been sparse, which depressed him in probably equal measure to them.

How did the weapon he used for his job work? Was it some kind of crossbow? Where did the bolts go?

He pressed the trigger and it fired. He didn’t know anything about its inner working except that it needed some kind of a battery. Or was it called a clip? He received one of those every fifteen work cycles when he turned in the old one.

What was a battery?

It stored electricity.

How?

He had no idea. How had he never even considered that?

How did the Gloria Nostra travel between stars? What was it made of? How did it fly?

May as well have been magic as far as he knew. He knew of the ship’s purpose, of course. But for his entire life the Gloria had been in orbit above Athos III. They didn’t fly, just… floated there. It was something to do with something called orbital mechanics, or something like that.

What was that?

He had no idea. Argia knew.

Could Argia explain then?

Technical database unavailable.

How was the Gloria Nostra society structured? How had the structure come to be?

He had gaped at those two particular questions. He had never been part of society on the Gloria, just a trudge in the outer ring. As far as he knew the ship was ran by women and there were just a few other men, all of them scattered in menial jobs.

Why was it structured that way?

“I was a pest removal technician. I killed bugs. In the sewage systems and in the walls. I barely know how to read,” he told them, incredulous. “I was one rung higher on the social ladder than the critters I was killing.”

How did he travel to other worlds with his mind?

His interface chip did that for him.

How?

He didn’t know.

What, precisely, was a chip?

He didn’t know exactly. Some kind of computer.What was a computer?

A thinking machine.

How did a machine think, exactly?

He didn’t know.

Really, how had he not considered any of these things?

They were just there…

And so on. Questioning him had frustrated Tallah, and then it had frustrated Sil. He was the first Other they had ever encountered and he was, by their estimation, a complete waste of breath.

“Others, like you, pop up from time to time,” Sil had explained to him in one of their sessions. “They claim to be from other worlds, brought here by forces unknown. None, as far as I know, have lasted long here. Disease, assassination, loss of faculties, you name it. You did well to keep your mouth shut about your origins.”

And then the questions started again, on and on, of increasingly obscure nature.

Was he shocked when awakening on Edana? How was he coping with the extreme social discrepancy between his ship and Valen? Why did the sky make him anxious? Could he describe the feeling? These were mostly Sil’s questions and she had a habit of niggling at everything he said until she was either pleased, or too frustrated with him to keep going.

“If I understand everything you’ve said, and it has been a challenge to make any heads or tails of it, then you’re lucky that you have that thing in your head,” she had said after a particularly long questioning. “Is it normal for all of your people?”

He had to think on that. Argia provided the answer.

“It’s mandatory for technicians and core crew. For others it’s optional.”

She jutted that down.

“Your so-called implant is acting as a buffer and interpreter as far as I can figure. Some of its function seems to be to sedate or regulate your mood, which I expect exists for medical purposes. It’s fascinating, really. I hate that I don’t have another case to compare you to.”

Of course, she tested out her theories by having him under the effect of various artefacts and magic effects. Argia, limited as she was, offered up almost precise estimations and interpretations of the effects he was experiencing. That was useful. It turned him into a cheap, hapless appraisal expert.

An unexpected boon that earned Vergil his first kind word from Tallah had come after he’d read the name of the helmet. Argia had attached a marker to it, for easy identification. Horvath the Hammer’s Cursed Helm, it said, and that had really gotten Tallah excited.

Horvath had been a dwarven hero that had, in her words, led a desperate defence of the Lang Fortress wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his helmet against a host of invaders, likely some form of daemons. They had burrowed in from underneath Lang in the dead of night and caught the entire garrison with their literal pants down. Horvath died in that defence, of course, and the entire fortress had been burned to the ground.

Apparently the helmet contained some sort of echo of him. It had Tallah cooing over it for days afterwards.

“I don’t know how safe it is for you to use this. Aliana certainly thinks it’s bad for you,” Tallah had said when they tested if he could use it on his own. “It was created in a very different way than we do enchantments now so we don’t exactly know how potent this possession is. It’s clearly cursed, as we understand the concept, but it’s got some good uses. Sil could probably take it apart eventually but we’d lose the artefact and I think it’s more useful as is. We’ll keep studying it and see if we can find a way around its more damaging aspects.”

Vergil didn’t even try to worry about the risk. He understood that the helmet made him into a fierce warrior if powered by one of them. Not being responsible for his actions was more comforting than he would have liked to admit.

All in all, Vergil had mostly enjoyed the ten days since he had been taken in by the two channellers. He’d learned much and had been… safe? Aside from the early fright they’d given him, they’d mostly been kind. Sil had taken a keen interesting in getting him into some sort of healthy shape. She kept mixing bitter tonics for him and mandated daily exercise.

Which he was to do now.

Having been dismissed for the day, Vergil slunk away from the room still massaging his numb hand. Pins and needles were starting up and he found that he could flex the fingers after a few minutes. After the first day of interrogations, they had a servant’s bed prepared for him in the central hallway as well as a wash-basin, a table and a wardrobe to store his clothes. All in all, these were the best accommodations he had enjoyed in his entire life. How lucky he was.

Will they throw me out when I’m no longer interesting for them? Will I be alone here? Again?

He still massaged his hand as he sat down heavily on his bed. The room spun for a moment. Horvath’s helmet clattered to the floor from where he had set it on his pillow. He picked up and set it back on the bed at some unknown whisper inside him that demanded it.

And it also told him he’ll never be quite alone again. Maybe Sil had cracked a window open because he felt the cold at the base of his spine with a shuddering jolt.

“Vergil,” Sil’s voice called him back a moment later.

He had aimed at spending the rest of the day trying to read one of the many martial books that Tallah had given him. His literacy was steadily improving and she seemed genuinely pleased whenever he showed an interest in learning.

He groaned as he had to get up again, head still light.

“Yes, Miss?” he answered from the doorway.

“Sil is just fine. I don’t need you to always Miss me about everything,” she replied and beckoned him back in. “Get dressed. We’ll head out to buy you some proper clothes and armour. The Corps must have given you at least some basic plate training. Right?”

“Yes, Mis— Y-yes, Sil,” he answered. A lifetime of instincts had a small disagreement with his new orders.

He avoided looking at Tallah. Her displeasure could ignite entirely without warning. She didn’t look to be much older than him, but when she looked at him it was always with the same terrible intent of pinning him to the wall with her gaze, blasting out his soul and then sieving it for any scrap of knowledge or secrets he might have hidden away.

The sorceress looked up sharply from her tome as if some sudden realisation had just occurred to her. He flinched.

“We need to see the old man,” she said, turning to Sil. “What time is it?”

Sil gazed out the window at a mostly clear dark blue sky tinged with a soft hue of purple. There was a few hours’ gap in the snow fall on that day and the light out was suggesting afternoon. It also suggested a fanged chill that lurked at the edge of night.

“Still early, I guess. Second bell of the evening? Does it matter?”

“Excellent. We shop for helmet-boy here and then we go see Ludwig.”

Sil groaned and put her head on the table.

“Why must you ruin this for me?” she whined, to Vergil’s puzzlement.

They acted so different to one another than they did to him.

“I had no idea that buying him armour meant so much to you,” Tallah replied, eyebrow raised in as much confusion as he felt. “By all means, go and have him try on armour. I’m not stopping you.”

“I want something sweet, Tallah. I’m sick to death of Verti’s pastry chef. Everything’s caramel with that girl, no fruit, no butter, no nothing. Caramel this. Caramel that. My teeth hurt from so much bloody caramel.”

The sorceress walked past Vergil, snorting. Her laugh echoed out of the shared bathroom.

She laughs like a horse. He banished the traitorous thought lest she could somehow hear it.

Sil apparently remembered Vergil was still there and blushed slightly.

“Ludwig is an old teacher of hers,” she said. Her deflection had no subtlety whatsoever. “He drones on and on, when he’s not being insufferable.”

“You were using me as an excuse to go out? For sweets? Why?”

“Because I’m a fickle woman and I do fickle things,” she replied crisply. Even smiled slightly.

Tallah poked her head out of the bathroom and called to them across the hallway.

“I want something sweet and savoury too, maybe. I’ll shop with helmet-boy; you find me something that fits my cravings.” The door slammed shut.

“I stand corrected. We’re both fickle women. I could kiss her sometimes.” She looked at him and frowned. “Close your mouth, Vergil. You look like an imbecile.”

Vergil did just as instructed.

“I don’t understand you two,” he said in a small voice.

“You get used to it.”