“You were about to tell me how you encumber people before we were so rudely interrupted,” Karkov suggested in response to Rin’s silence.
Rin ignored him and spent a few more moments reviewing the material in her head, deciding what to reveal and in how much detail. As familiar as she was with the practical aspects of the process, she never had tried to present them in a cogent manner. She was appalled how haphazard and disorganized her recollections were. The gods themselves had taught her these things, so it behooved her to take them more seriously. They should be second nature by this point. After all, they were her nature.
Rin wondered whether this actually was true. Would her understanding of these secrets fade and corrupt like all other knowledge? Perhaps she merely was a custodian. A temporary custodian. Temporary or not, she evidently was a poor one. Karkov had done her a favor by forcing her to reify such things. The old saying was true: one never really understood something until they taught it. Was that why the gods had taught her?
The silence persisted for a minute, then two.
“Changed your mind?” Karkov prodded. A sharp look was Rin’s only reply. He shrugged and began tapping out a noisome beat on the table. After another minute she finally was ready and she began without warning or preamble.
“You’re partly right. I can create new spheres. But there are limitations.”
Karkov nodded. “If you could make arbitrary changes, I imagine you would have destroyed me long ago. You could have converted me to a Two and then killed me with ease.”
Rin suddenly stared at him. “Sree said something very similar. Did you get this from her?”
“Why that little minx,” Karkov exclaimed with a smile. “She never said anything.”
“I’ll take that as a no. And from the sound of it you didn’t tell her either. Just coincidence?”
Karkov tossed his head. “Who can say?”
Rin wasn’t sure she believed in such coincidences, but decided to let this one pass. Sree had said they didn’t discuss it, and Rin at least believed her.
“But I can see why she reached a similar conclusion,” Karkov continued. “If you could have undone or changed the protections, you would have killed me already.”
“That’s an interesting assumption. What makes you think I couldn’t? Maybe I just decided now is the right time. Maybe I want to do worse than kill you.”
Karkov smiled. “No, there’s a reason you waited until now to seek me out. You only recently figured out how.” He studied her face. “Or you think you have.”
“Apparently, you’re not just arrogant and stupid, but senile as well.”
Karkov raised his hand high in the air like an eager schoolchild and fidgeted in his chair.
“What is it now?” Rin grumbled. Clearly, she wouldn’t get anywhere without addressing this latest nonsense.
“Um, Ms. … Rin? Wait, do you even have a last name?” Karkov asked, suddenly serious. Before she could answer, he went back to his schoolboy voice. “I think you already used that insult.”
“Okay, how about fucking fucktard. Did I call you that?”
“Much better. Though …” Karkov scrunched up his face. “… some people might find that offensive.”
“Yes, I’m sure the fucking fucktard community would feel insulted being lumped in with you.”
Rin cleared her throat. “AS I was saying, your memory clearly has atrophied as much as your other faculties. I didn’t wait until now. I tried a few years ago, and you fled like a coward.”
She smiled and wiggled her fingers along the surface of the table. “Scuttled away, like a little beetle. Less than your smallest soldier.”
“You’d know. You fucked him.”
Rin was tempted to point out that he just had insulted himself but refrained from doing so. Why get in the way of a man intent on making a fool of himself? A moment passed before either broke the silence. Finally, Karkov laughed.
“You know what the funny thing is? You probably think I had some grand plan back then. That I engineered a clever escape at the first sign of trouble. No doubt, I had been waiting for you all those years, my finely-tuned intelligence apparatus poised to alert me to the slightest snap of a twig.”
Rin shrugged. “It’s what I would do.”
“Did you really imagine I would abandon my entire people to your wrath? Let you kill them without a second thought?”
“Yeah, pretty much. If you weren’t already busy killing them yourself, that is.”
Karkov sighed. “I’m not like you, Rin. As much as I’d like to take credit, the truth is far more banal. Your plan failed because I happened to be away at a meeting.”
“A meeting? I doubt that very much. A meeting with whom?”
“Does it matter? It just was a run-of-the-mill meeting, one of the endless stream which plague a man in my position. They too form an encumbrance, if you will.”
“Sounds more like a protection, and a rather convenient one at that.”
Karkov looked at her. “Believe what you wish, but the fact remains that your grand plan fell apart because of a simple meeting.” He leaned toward the table. “How does that make you feel, Rin. You’re indestructible, but fate still can fuck with you.”
“Yet here you are now.” She grinned. “I’d say fate made up for it nicely.”
Karkov thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s it. You made some sort of discovery during the last few decades. That’s why you’ve been seeking me out. That’s why ‘now’ is special.”
“Or maybe you’re not special,” Rin suggested. “Maybe I went down a list alphabetically, and just reached your name.”
“We change our names all the time. Alphabetical is doubtful.”
“Fine. A list based on height or penis size.”
Karkov leaned back. “The women all would be last. That’s not very egalitarian.”
“Or first. You’d be right after the women on that list. Maybe even before them.”
He chuckled. “No, you’re not the type of person who goes down a list. You just get it in your head to do something and then you do it. And now you plan to do me.”
Rin smirked. “Back to sex, are we?”
“You brought it up. But I’m not in the mood right now. Maybe you can seduce me later, if you still have it.”
Rin was silent for a few moments. “Yes, I made some progress recently.”
Karkov said nothing, and she continued.
“As you say, I can’t simply restate the protections. It doesn’t work like that. They wouldn’t really be protections if they could be taken away. The gods told me this much when they taught me.”
“The gods taught you? That’s a little pompous, don’t you think? You never used to say that.”
Rin wondered if this was true. She couldn’t remember what she used to say or how she used to be. Nor was there any reason to, at least ordinarily. It was easy to pretend she always had been the same when there was nobody to contradict her. Karkov could be making nonsense up too. It was best to assume his words conveyed no information, though Rin hoped this wouldn’t prove unequivocally true. That would be inconvenient given what she was trying to elicit from him.
“Call it what you will. If I create a new sphere, it must include all the protections from the old one. It must expand upon them.”
Karkov was visibly shocked. “That makes no sense. It’s great if you want to make us harder to kill, but how would that help you? It seemed from Darrouil’s account …”
He suddenly stopped, realizing it was unwise to mention that name under the circumstances. Anger momentarily flashed across Rin’s face, but she kept her calm.
“Sorry,” he ventured.
“Don’t,” Rin grumbled. “You weren’t sorry when you turned him against me, and you aren’t now. You will be, though.”
“I didn’t turn him against you. I simply told him the truth. Besides, I suspect your intentions weren’t too kind to begin with.”
He leaned in and met her eyes. “Oh, Rin. I haven’t been very good to you, have I?”
There was a time when that may have worked, Rin supposed. Back when she was young and naive. Now such an attempt at manipulation seemed laughable.
“That’s neither here nor there. I have to kill you as a matter of course.”
“Yes, as a matter of course,” Karkov echoed sarcastically. “With that.” He pointed at the sphere in her pocket, and Rin nodded.
“But how?”
“Would you like to find out?” Rin’s mouth spread in a predatory smile.
“I’d rather you just tell me.”
“Even better, I’ll do both.”
“Um, the explanation first, if you please.”
Rin looked at Karkov. “Not all the protections are benign ones. For example, ‘I cannot change.’”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure you can if you put your mind to it.”
“It’s a protection, numbnuts.”
“I see. So those do exist,” Karkov replied after some consideration. “It looks like a protection and is one in a way. Does that do what I imagine?”
“How the hell would I know what you imagine? It stops all change. The person is frozen in their physical state forever. That precludes any thought as well. It’s a merciful exit, probably the most so of any.”
“Is that what you’ve been using so far?”
“Sometimes. There are others that are less pleasant. Many others,” she added in a pointed tone. “And much less pleasant.”
Rin was calculating her next provocation, when she realized something.
“But you already know all this. How do you think I killed that lying little sack of crap?”
“Ever the lady,” Karkov sighed. “Which lying little sack of crap? We’ve known quite a few.”
“Well, not you. Obviously.”
“I’ll have you know I’m not little. But then, you already know that.”
“The Prince,” Rin clarified, running a hand through her hair in aggravation.
Karkov still had a perplexed expression.
“You really didn’t know how I did that?” she asked in disbelief. It was plausible that he never had figured it out — or tried to. They were so young back then, and she certainly hadn’t told him everything. Who knew how closely he had listened to what she did say? Karkov had been, to use his own words, distracted around her.
“I thought he just fell ill and died.”
“You’re such an idiot,” snapped Rin. “That was his dad. She poisoned him. I had nothing to do with that. But I did have special business with the son. I never told you about any of that, eh?”
Karkov shook his head.
“Well it was before we met, so that’s understandable. It’s not exactly the sort of thing that would recommend a girl to her suitor. The details don’t really matter. All you need to know is that I encumbered him.”
“He was immortal?”
“No, you schmuck. Why the hell would I make him immortal?” She reflected a moment, then corrected herself. “Well, I guess technically I did make him immortal. Just not in the way he wanted.”
“I cannot change?”
“Oh no. That’s way too benign. As I said, I had personal reasons. Fortunately for him, I still was inexperienced. His encumbrance wasn’t nearly as bad as it should have been.”
Rin gave Karkov a sweet smile. “You won’t have that problem. I promise you the full benefit of my many years of practice.”
Karkov didn’t seem the least bit concerned. In fact, he was lost in thought. Rin gave the table a heavy tap, and he looked up. “But you encumbered him with his first sphere. He never was a proper immortal to begin with.”
“There’s no such thing as a proper immortal, except maybe one that’s encumbered. And I just was illustrating that negative protections existed from the start. My use of them is nothing new.”
“But there’s a difference if you do it with a second sphere. What happens to the first one? You said that nothing could harm it.”
“Rebinding doesn’t destroy it, but the old sphere becomes irrelevant. It just is an object, albeit an indestructible one. Technically, it is protected by the new sphere as well as itself.”
“So you don’t need my sphere?” Karkov sounded skeptical.
“Irrelevant. You could leave it with me, and it would neither help nor hinder my purpose. You do realize I wouldn’t have given it back if it mattered.”
Karkov clutched the sphere in his pocket. “All the same, I’ll hang on to it.”
Rin shrugged. “Suit yourself. I like my enemies to feel secure. It makes my job much easier.”
“Is that what this is — your job? Do you gather around the watercooler with the other parricides?”
She smirked. “Parricide? Are we related? I don’t remember marrying my brother. Or are you my dad? Maybe my son.”
“We’re your family, for better or worse. The one you made. So yeah, I guess in a sense you did fuck your son. And we know how that always turns out.”
“I fuck him a second time, just not the way he wants.”