From somewhere in the shadows, a voice whispered, “I will.”
And she knew the voice had been her own.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nefron strode swiftly but silently into a dim hallway, the last stretch of a labyrinth that twisted and turned within the palace walls. She came to a small inner chamber lit by a single flickering taper. A dark man in a blue robe lounged on a settee.
“Well, sweetie,” Mimses said. “Your dupes are all in place. Strange tools, even for you.”
Nefron leaned against the wall and smiled crookedly. “I imagine the newcomers believe me to be their tool.”
“Yeah,” Mimses grunted. “You moved a little too impulsively, don’t you think? You should’ve consulted me.”
“No time,” Nefron retorted. “A profitable opportunity presented itself and I seized it, just like you taught me.”
“Using my Incarnates was a good plan,” he replied sourly.
She grinned mockingly. “Except the newcomers killed the only ones you could trust.”
“And they’ll pay for it.”
“Not for a while yet. Pharaoh is suspicious.”
Mimses’s eyes widened at her words. “How do you know?”
“One of the wall sentries saw me outside of the city yesterday, when Kela and I were hiding the albino.”
Mimses dry-washed his face with his hands. “Not good. Not good. If Pharaoh finds him—”
“They won’t. Kela has moved him twice already. I’m not even sure where he is right now, just in case Pharaoh tried to probe me.”
“What’s the albino like?”
“Young and strong. He killed your Serapis in Baltic Alley, though he was debilitated by a metauh rod. We’ve kept him drugged since then, and I squeezed his mind while he slept.”
Mimses dropped his hands and gazed at her skeptically. “Squeezed his mind how?”
“I stimulated his libido. I embedded certain perceptions about Kela and me into his consciousness. That, combined with the potion and Kela’s attention to him, will keep him tractable until we need him.”
“You hope.”
“He’s young, like I said,” Nefron responded defensively. “Full of hormones, and his sex drive is very close to the surface, very easy to manipulate.”
“As long as he’s satisfied with Kela and will stay put for another couple of days.”
Nefron sighed wearily. “If his attention wanders, I’ll provide him with another distraction.”
Mimses eyed her dourly. “You?”
She shrugged carelessly. “If need be. If I gauged his reaction to me correctly, the very thought of me gets him hard.”
Mimses smirked. “Kind of like how that mutie whore affects Pharaoh. How goes it with her?”
“Her psychic defenses are strong but undisciplined. I encountered considerable resistance yesterday when I supplanted the image of the one-eyed man with that of Pharaoh. It is difficult to, on the one hand, verbally try to convince her Pharaoh is a monster, and on the other, mentally nudge her into his arms.”
“A little too complicated for my tastes.”
“Not really. Krysty is so busy trying to screen out Pharaoh’s influence, she’s completely unaware that I’m slipping in the back door and chipping away at her barriers.”
“Where is she now?”
“With Pharaoh. She seemed sluggish this morning, so I figure Pharaoh gave her mind a squeeze while she slept. Combined with the spiked wine I poured for her and Pharaoh’s proximity, she should be a prime candidate for Spellbound City before the day is through.”
“Sort of like your mother,” Mimses commented dryly.
Nefron pushed herself away from the wall, thrusting her head forward angrily. “He seduced and tricked her and killed her.”
“He didn’t kill her,” Mimses stated. “And it didn’t take a whole hell of a lot of seducing.”
Nefron’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a silent snarl. “She wasn’t in her right mind—you know that.”
“Oh, she was in her right mind,” Mimses said with a smirk. “It was her reproduction system that wasn’t right. Pharaoh fixed her so she could give birth to you, but it was a one-time-only deal. The second time he played around with her insides, she wasn’t so lucky.”
“He did operate on her, performed surgery against her will. That’s the same as killing her.”
“Nefron, sweetie,” Mimses said, striving for a tone of condolence, “poor old Connie didn’t have much will left to her.”