A Flame in Hali (69 page)

They sprang apart, and the cloaked woman drew herself to her full height. Her eyes blazed like live coals.

“You made a bargain, Eduin Deslucido,” she said, raising one skeletal hand to point at the Tower. “Do you now deny me my prize?”

Deslucido?
Dyannis wondered.

“I never said you could have
her,
” he answered, his voice hoarse.

“A death, you said, and we agreed. You have your death and I will fulfill the purpose for which I was created.”

Eduin shook his head. “May all the gods forgive me, I made you what you are. What I have made, I will now unmake!”

The figure turned, and a flicker of human emotion passed across the skull-white face. “You will not find it so easy. Some things, once set in motion, cannot be stopped.”

“If you must have a death, take me instead, but let her live! Let them all live—even him—and let it end here.”

“You swore an oath, so many times that it is etched into your soul.”

“Then I am forsworn.” His voice rang with resolve, and at the same time, despair. “I give it up, now and forever!”

“Ah!” The woman in the cloak shuddered as if wounded. At the same moment, the skies convulsed. Winds sprang up, rapidly gaining in ferocity.

Dyannis crept forward. She recognized the figure now. It was Naotalba, the Bride of Zandru, sometimes considered a symbol of noble sacrifice, but as often, an evil omen. How had Eduin come to deal with a demigoddess?

I made you,
he had said. Here in the Overworld, the only reality was thought, and once he had been a powerful
laranzu
. Had he indeed conjured up a mythic image and shaped it to his own ends?

He now stood, legs braced wide in a posture of confrontation. Dyannis dared not break his concentration, though a thousand questions boiled up in her mind. In an odd shift of vision, she saw what linked Eduin and Naotalba. Strands of psychic material, some as fine as spider’s silk, others coarse and knotted, ran between them. Some pulsed the color of clotted blood, like congested
laran
channels. In places, they twisted together, forming webs and nodes of darkness.

The strands, thick and thin, all sprang from the ravaged wound in Eduin’s belly and converged upon a single point deep in the substance of Naotalba’s form. Instinctively, Dyannis knew that each was born of some moment of bitterness, of resentment festering into hatred, of twisted dreams and poisoned fears.

Dark Lady Avarra, what could have happened to turn that radiant boy—or any man—into a source of such evil?

Singly and by handfuls, Eduin wrenched the strands free from his own body. Colorless blood streamed from the fresh wounds. If he cried out, Dyannis could not hear it above the shrieking of the storm. The loose ends whipped free in the winds, shriveling. Within moments, they turned into dust that was blown away.

When he grasped the last one, the thickest, it writhed in his hands. He staggered, almost losing his balance. Dyannis had heard of men who, under the control of
laran
spells of madness, had taken knives to their own bellies, disemboweling themselves. She had heard that Eduin had used such spells in defense at Hestral Tower against the besieging armies of Rafael Hastur. She wondered if, in some twisted version of justice, he were not inflicting the same dreadful injury upon himself.

The twisted rope came free in Eduin’s hands. Dyannis could not see his face, but she felt the desolation that gripped him, the terrifying aloneness, the absence of the presence that had shaped his entire life.

The storm died as quickly as it had begun. Naotalba lifted her face, no longer smooth and pale, but fallen in upon itself. Whatever strength of purpose Eduin had poured into her was now gone.

Bloodless lips moved, shaping speech. “You have done a brave and foolish thing, Eduin Deslucido.”

Deslucido,
Dyannis repeated in her mind. That was the second time Naotalba had called Eduin by that name.

“I have seen the world of gods as well as men,” Naotalba continued, “and I do not know another who would have chosen as you have. I will return now to the realm of my bridegroom. We will meet there soon.”

Naotalba turned away, and the folds of her cloak gathered her into nothingness.

With a cry, Eduin fell to his knees. Dyannis rushed to his side. He pressed both hands over his belly, as if to staunch the flow of blood. Even as she approached, he lifted his hands, revealing unbroken skin beneath the tattered shirt. He looked up at her, his eyes filled with amazement. His mouth moved, but no words came.

Dyannis felt no pity for him, only realization condensing into fury. “You knew about the attack before it ever began! You—you must have sent it!”

He flinched at her words, but did not turn away his gaze. In that moment, she read the bitterness of years reaching back far before she had known him. She saw, but could not understand the driving obsession. A chain of deeds, like loathsome beads strung on a silken cord, stretched into the past. She heard a voice like the slither of scales over rock, whispering,
You swore to kill, k-k-kill . . .

She saw a stern Queen upon her throne, the rapt look on the face of a pale, dark-eyed girl, the storm-racked landscape of a once-Gifted mind, an old man in physician’s robes led away in chains . . . and farther back, the lake at Hali, an army of beggars poised to attack . . .

“Why?” she cried. “Why would you do such a thing? Why destroy an entire Tower?”

“I did not mean to destroy Hali Tower, only one person within its walls.” His voice was inexpressibly bleak.

Her heart froze. Had he hated her so much, all these years?

“No, not you!” Eduin cried. “Never you. It was Varzil’s death I sought, and to my damnation, I have brought about yours as well.”

“But Varzil isn’t here!” Dyannis said. “He left on a secret mission some days ago.”

“Then it has all been for naught.”

She brushed the thought aside. “Why kill Varzil? What has he done to harm you?”

Surely it was not her brother’s attempts to foil their budding romance so many years ago. She had rebelled against Varzil’s orders, plunging headlong into the affair. Time and distance and some mysterious change within Eduin, not Varzil’s interference, had ended it.

An icy thought trickled through her mind. She remembered Varzil sitting with her outside the ruins of Cedestri Tower, remembering his lost love. She could almost hear his words, as appalling now as when they were first spoken.

“You hated Varzil because he stood in your way of destroying first Carolin Hastur and then Felicia of Hestral Tower,” Dyannis said. In his eyes, she read the truth of her words.

She took a step closer. He was trembling. She wanted to lash out, to hit him, hurt him. Yet he made no move to defend himself, either in word or action. He saw himself as utterly damned, irrevocably lost, and she, for whom he was prepared to sacrifice everything, would be his judge and executioner.

She lowered herself to the ground in front of him. Her anger drained away. “Why?” she repeated. “Why did you hate the Hasturs so much?”

“Felicia was the daughter of the witch-Queen Taniquel,” he said. “And Carlo—gods forgive me, I tried to kill him even though I loved him!—was the heir to the throne of King Rafael. Together, they destroyed my family.”

“Of course! Naotalba called you
Deslucido,
not MacEarn. How can that be? Everyone thought that family extinct. I see now they were wrong. But the war against King Damian ended years before either of us were born.”

He nodded. “As you may have guessed, I am the only surviving member of that once-great family. After the last battle, my uncle and his son Belisar were executed, but not my father, the
laranzu
Rumail Deslucido.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Dyannis said.
And how he was responsible for using bonewater dust in the Battle of Drycreek.
“I thought he perished in the fall of Neskaya Tower.”

“No, he escaped to the wild lands beyond the Kadarin. He married a local woman, took her name, and raised my brothers and myself, swearing us to only one purpose.”

Dyannis shuddered, both at the obsession that had driven Eduin’s father and the harshness of Rafael’s victory. Such things did occur in war, she supposed, although many times, the conquering lord would exile a worthy adversary, keeping his sons as hostages to ensure a lasting peace. Perhaps Rafael had an overriding reason to treat his enemy with such ruthlessness.

“Even if King Rafael acted out of malice, surely it should have ended there,” she said aloud. “He had no sons, so the throne passed to a collateral line and thence to Carolin. Surely that is justice enough.”

“There can be no justice for such a crime as his, save for the complete obliteration of his line—and hers,” Eduin said bleakly. “After all, that is what they did to
us.
Without his sorcerer’s skills, my father would have perished. Their slaughter would have been complete. I do not say that my father’s vengeance was right, only that it was justified.”

So many lives lost or ruined, Dyannis thought, whole stretches of land poisoned for generations, villages laid waste, families bereft of loved ones. And for what? To fuel some King’s greed for power?

Yet everything she knew about Rafael Hastur and Queen Taniquel suggested they were not senselessly evil.

Her astral form shivered, and she knew that in the physical realm, a hail of burning stone and wood had fallen across her and Javanne. Droplets of
clingfire
struck her in a dozen places. Her hair and gown caught fire. She looked down at her psychic form to see the pale flames rising. In another instant, she would feel the agony of burning. Here in the Overworld, however, she could slow the passage of time, long enough at least to learn why she and so many others must die.

She reached out to Eduin, grasping his arms. “Why? What started it all? What caused such hatred that men would treat one another in such monstrous fashion?”

“They could not—” Eduin’s voice stumbled. “They feared to let us live.”

“Why? What had your family done?”

“It was not what we did.” He sounded even more desolate than ever. “It was what we
were
. It was because of the Deslucido Gift.”

“And what was that? Some relic from the Ages of Chaos?”

“I do not know how it began, by design or some accident of breeding, only that if anyone found out, it would be the death of us all.”

“What was this Gift, that Rafael Hastur and Queen Taniquel would commit such barbarity to eliminate it?”

Eduin gazed at her for a long moment. The ingrained secrecy of a lifetime rose up behind his eyes, holding him immobile.

Screams shivered through the Overworld. The flames grew brighter, tinged now with the orange-white of
clingfire.

“At least tell me before I die!” she cried.

He blurted out, “We can defeat truthspell.”

“What! That isn’t possible!”

“Believe me,
carya preciosa,
it is more possible than you imagine. I have done it myself, stood in the blue fire and spoken things I knew to be false.”

Abhorrence rose up in her like bile behind her throat. As Varzil had said, she had an instinct for seeing the political implications of things. She knew immediately what it would mean if truthspell could not be trusted. Without such assurance, no pact or treaty would stand, and even a King’s honor would be suspect. The only certainty would lie in power, and the key to power was
laran
weaponry. Varzil’s Compact, and any hope of a lasting peace, would perish like dayflies in a Hellers storm.

“This Gift,” she said thickly, “all of your family possessed it?”

“Only my father and I had it in full measure. My uncle, King Damian, and Prince Belisar could do it only with the aid of my father.”

“So the Hasturs—”

“Somehow, King Rafael and Queen Taniquel must have found out. But they thought Damian and Belisar were the only ones left alive. They didn’t know my father survived—or that
he
was the one responsible for Damian’s ability to nullify truthspell.”

“Ah!” The cry burst from her. She knew why Rafael and Taniquel had slain their conquered foes, out of fear for their entire world. What were the lives of two men, or two dozen, against the very foundations of truth?

The Hasturs, Rafael and Taniquel, had killed the wrong men. That single act of injustice gave rise to a revenge that consumed the lives of everyone it touched. Nor would it end with the destruction of Hali Tower. Her vision went black as she looked upon a charred and smoking landscape.

Carolin would not rest until he discovered who had launched the attack, and all the wide lands would be set ablaze. Men would reach for their most powerful weapons in the name of righteousness. The
clingfire
that even now consumed her flesh would be only the beginning.