Capítulo 9: 9
"It's all right for some." A gruff voice swum through Inri's emerging consciousness.
He sat up, the heavy book toppling forward onto his lap.
Two large people were following Wallice into the room.
[I would feel better if he didn't have a key. But I also want him to fix this place up for me. And he has the key to every place in the palace so he must be trustworthy. I should think about this later.]
These were not really helpful thoughts to be having right now. It was hard to see through the glow green mist-rain that Inri was fairly sure didn't exist. Because he was raised to be polite Inri tried to act like everything was fine. This mostly involved resisting the urge to vomit.
He swung his feet, feeling for the floor. He slammed shut the book shut and sighed like reading it was a tedious chore, not the magical equivalent of being pole-axed.
It felt, to Inri, like something else was now in his brain. Inri had never tried to look inside his mind, so he wasn't sure how to even do it. It didn't seem like like a good idea to even try while he had company.
Wallice looked around the room like he was expecting something to have changed overnight. Or like it had. He grunted. "The twins are here to fix the windows and look at the roof."
"Right."
The twins looked like a matching set of girl and boy half-giant gollums. Carpentry wasn't normally a women's trade, but he bet no one was going to try and disagree with the twins about anything, least of all that.
[The new knowledge in Inri's brain was a complete ritual for re-animating a freshly deceased corpse. It was not the lesson he was meant to receive at this point. But a previous guardian of the book had committed suicide and left the book open. An especially persistent rat had chewed through a few vellum pages, because lambskin paper is basically just really well-done jerky—at least to a rat. In the process it had become the first rat necromancer, but only ever managed to use the ritual on itself. That rat was still alive, or more accurately undead, somewhere in a riverbank burrow about nine-day's ride roughly northwest from Inri's current location. More about that later.]
"I should…" Inri began.
Inri had no idea what he should be doing. When confronted by doubt he normally shut himself in his room until the feeling went away. Failing that, he normally spoke to his mother.
Storgie was not known for her loving nature. Most people considered her stand-offish at best, probably more like straight-up cold. Of course, that was exactly what they expected from a queen, so it never bothered them. They even kind of liked it. But for the son from whom nothing was expected, she exhibited nothing but unconditional love. This was why Inri's brothers despised him, but he had yet to work this out.
It was a little infantilizing to go running to mother, but Inri didn't have a better idea. Or a lot of pride.
"…go," Inri added, very belatedly – even more than he realized because his chronological continuity was a bit disrupted by having an entire necromantic ritual hiding in his cognitive peripheral vision.
"Yeah," Wallice said. He said it completely non-judgmentally, as experienced servants often do. He gave no fucks about what Inri did, so long as he did it somewhere else. He had a window to fix. And a roof to… look at. That shit probably could not be fixed. He had no idea what he was going to do about that.
The cat watched them all with blanket condemnation. The lanky person who had fed her last night was now her person, but that didn't mean her person wasn't a putz. He was still a human being after all. The rest just looked like a cluster of tail stompers.
Inri awkwardly wrapped the book, clutched the amulet, and made his exit. "I should go to the library," he muttered. His logic was that the best way to hide a book was amongst other books. So, either he should leave the book in the library, or take some other books back to his new drafty home.
The cat twitched her tail upwards at a jaunty angle and followed him.
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