Revelation (34 page)

“Don’t you worry. There’s naught so much to see. I’m the homeliest fellow was ever born ’neath a tree, and you . . . by my boots, you are a rascally sight. I just caught the rumor that the mad ones had snatched them a captive. Gastai can’t keep a secret worth the devil—and devils aren’t worth a sow’s tail, as you fairly know, since you’ve been living with a pack of them. How in all that’s holy did you end up with these particular villains? They’re so rotting mad, they’re not even sent out to hunt anymore.”

I tried another peek and caught a blurry image of a stocky, flat-faced man with long, straight hair, just turning gray. He was human. Solid. Ezzarian.

“Please”—I rolled forward as a wave of pain from my belly met the lancing fire from a torn shoulder—“can you help me?” My immediate misery precluded any consideration of how one of my own people had come to be walking about freely in the realm of demons.

“It’s possible. In the ordinary chance of things, no one interferes with these brutes, but Kaarat won’t allow them to destroy a Warden before he’s had a crack at him. You
are
a Warden, am I right? The ways of the world haven’t changed so that some other kind of fool is sent here?”

“I am. Was.”

“The only one was fighting for quite a long while? The one who changes himself? Shifts? Wings, I heard—what a wonder—and who did for the Naghidda? That’s you?”

Warning bells rang in my tattered mind. I craved human speech. I longed to pour out everything I had left . . . then perhaps I could find the things that had gone missing. But I could not silence caution. Tears rolled down my face, tears not caused by the brightness of his light. “Please, I cannot—”

His hand lay gently on my shoulder, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Sorry, lad. Not fair to press. It’s just been so damnably long. I’m so hungered for news, for some sign that we’re still strong in our duty. I do their bidding here in this place, but I command my own soul. I vow it.”

“I’ve come to learn. To find truth about demons.”

“Truth?” He chuckled softly. “From the look of you, I’d say you’ve already learned that you’ve come to the wrong place.” But then his voice dropped even lower. “See here, now. You’ve no reason to trust me, and you’re right to be cautious, but I’ve a bit of influence. I promise you’ve no other ally here. The brutes claim you had no weapons. But perchance you did—being a Warden doesn’t go far beyond a portal without—and you found the clever skill to hide them. If you was to tell me how to fetch them, I might have better luck getting you out of here. Once you’re out, you can take me or leave me at your will.”

“It’s so hard . . .” So hard to remember. “No. I didn’t have any. I came . . . a demon warned me . . . something terrible to come . . . a Nevai came to me . . .” He would never believe me. “I had to come here to learn more of it.”

My visitor was quiet for so long a moment that I thought he was gone. I cracked my eyes open again, and he was staring at me in puzzlement. “A Nevai warned you? Who the devil . . . ? What did he tell you?”

Ham-fist started yelling murderously from a short distance away. I cringed, drawing up my knees and stuffing my hands between my thighs.

“Confound these cursed devils!” said the Ezzarian. “I’ve got to get out of here before they decide to keep me. I’ll do you no good torn to pieces. Keep yourself together, lad, and here . . .” His wide, warm hand rested on my pounding head for just a moment, leaving behind a tingling sensation. “. . . a little gift. Maybe it will give you some amusement. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

The light vanished. Darkness settled around me like the dirt thrown on a coffin. “Don’t go,” I cried. “Oh, gods have mercy, please don’t leave me.” I waved my arms wildly, trying to find him. I had used up all my pride, and the thought of being abandoned in the dark again came near destroying me. I was ready to tell him anything. But he was already gone.

Ham-fist and his fellows let me know what they thought of interfering visitors. By the time they were done, I wasn’t sure anyone had come. Perhaps it had only been another blow to my head.

 

 

 

I did not see the Ezzarian again for a very long while, but I did come to believe he was real. From the moment he touched his hand to my head, I could speak and understand the language of demons. Unfortunately, I had already learned most of what my captors had to say. Things like
dol fysgarra
—where are your weapons?—and
garaz do tsiet
—fight me now. Constant demands that I tell them my name and how I had managed to kill the Naghidda—the Precursor, a powerful demon they admired. Though I could not remember when or how, I supposed I had indeed done such a thing—killed a powerful demon called the Precursor. I was a Warden. My duty was to fight demons. The demons spoke most eloquently with their invisible whips and clubs and knives, and I was sure that if it went on very much longer, I would not remember anything at all. But somehow hearing their speech and understanding it, crude as it was, gave me a point of reference. I was no longer so alone in the painful darkness. Creatures with words were creatures I could hate, and that kept my mind alive. Barely.

 

On one day—until that point no different from the endless days preceding it—I was crouched over my lump of raw meat, gnawing at it hungrily, trying not to think about what it was, only that if I could get enough, it might keep me living. I had developed an unceasing tremor in my hands, and as I worked at the tough, gristly mess, I concentrated on making my hands be still. They refused.

“You will give him over now.”

I fumbled at my feast, despising the way I flinched at every sudden sound or movement. Quickly I downed the last dregs from my cup. The liquid was thin and sour, but I would need whatever sustenance I could get if they were coming for me again so soon. I wiped my mouth on the back of my trembling hand and tried to clear my mind, inviting emptiness.

I had taught myself to embrace emptiness, to immerse myself in it. The effort neither blunted the pain nor strengthened my mind, but at least I could protect the few fading memories I had saved from their ravaging: a smattering of words and phrases—words that would make a difference in the world, words that would tell someone why I had come—and a few precious images—a babe’s soft fair cheek, a soaring bird of brown and white, a braid of bright red hair, a stone tower. I could not put names to these images anymore, nor remember why they were important, but when I was alone, I would take them out like a miser’s jewels and savor them. My secrets proved to me that I was yet my own master.

Ham-fist was very angry. My bones quailed at the memory of his rages. “He stays here. Don’t care who wants him. We’ve not done with him. We make him pay, that’s what. He’s the one as done us all these times just gone. The one as done for half our cadre, and the Naghidda, who promised we would hunt again and have all the
yladdimari
we wanted.”
Yladdimari
—human lives.

“Kaarat will have him tried. If he’s judged guilty, you’ll likely have your wish. No one will want anything to do with the slayer of the Naghidda, if this is indeed he. Many yet honor the fallen Tasgeddyr.”

I dug at my ears with my fists, trying to decide if the newcomer was human. I was always hearing things that weren’t there. The voice didn’t sound like the Ezzarian. I knew better than to hope. It had been months . . . forever . . . since he had come.

From one corner of my eye, I glimpsed a streak of red and purple. Sometimes I imagined I saw lights or colors in the everlasting blackness, but usually that was when the brutes had battered my head again, or stuck something into my eyes.

“Yddrass, gzit.”
Ham-fist kicked me. I wasn’t very fast at getting to my feet anymore.

“You claim this creature killed the Naghidda? Impossible.”

“He is the one, and we’ll have him back.”

“You’ll have whatever you’re given, beast. Servants of the Nameless, what a mess . . .”

I felt a shove at my back and staggered forward . . . into a churning, whirling, formless pool of gray cloud. A few moments of it, and I heaved up all the foulness I had just eaten. And so I was dizzy, confused, and slimed with bloody vomit when I stumbled into a stormy twilight.

 

“Is this him?”

“So say the mad ones. Doesn’t seem possible. I thought you might want to get a look at him before I take him out for testimony. Give you something interesting to top Yasnit when he starts his battle stories again.”

I had fallen to my knees on hard-packed snow, unable to open my eyes more than a slit. A bitterly cold wind ran razor fingers over my naked back and down my throat, setting me to coughing, and someone was poking at me with the toe of a boot, as if I were a dead cat found in an alley.

“Doesn’t seem very fierce. Not like the stories. How’d you get wind of him?”

“Kaarat heard they’d captured one of the creatures and plans to put him on trial. But the vessel has emptied a thousand times while the mad ones had him, so there’s probably not much use to it. Ylad don’t keep much of a mind if they’ve been in the pits too long. And they always end up dead once they’re out.”

What was the burden of dread that weighed so heavy whenever I thought about how long I’d been imprisoned? Something beyond the horror that they would send me back. It was so hard to remember.

“I’ve heard that Denas has taken an interest, because of the connection with the Naghidda.”

The two voices drifted lazily over my back. “Denas! I didn’t think he cared for anything but his ambition . . . and Vallyne, of course.”

“Hush, Vilgor. You mustn’t bandy her name about so freely—and certainly not in the same breath with Denas’s. She doesn’t take well to it. Even when Denas does exactly as she wishes, he finds a way to displease her.”

“So when will you be done with her garden?”

“Never. She’s demanded more roses and fifty new kinds of flowers . . .” The two of them rambled for some time. Though I could translate their words, the meaning was lost on me. It was so miserably cold. Who could make sense of gardens and roses while battered by this sleet-laced wind? I must have mistaken the words.

And then they started gossiping: who was allied with whom, and how someone had revealed a plot and been poisoned for it, but some other person had put them up to it and that one had vanished. Dead, it was said. Who knew where it would end? Their voices dropped low when they began to talk about a disagreement over who would lead “the great venture,” and how Rhadit was still looking for the one to open the way. “There’ll be more disappearances. You can be sure of it,” said the gardener. “Someone’s hired the assassin. He’s strutting about as if the Naghidda lived again.”

“Never trust him, Vilgor. I’ve heard what’s said about good Zelaz. He was the last who knew—”

“Hold your tongue, friend.”

None of it made sense, and my thick head could not seem to grasp any information that might serve my needs. Still huddled to the snowy ground, I pressed my tremulous hands to my eyes and tried to get a glimpse of where I was and who were these people who spoke of intrigues that seemed more fitting for an imperial palace than the demon realm. I could see no one. The gray light was dim, and my eyes kept blurring and watering, stung by flying ice crystals. Streaks of red and purple danced at the edges of my sight, and I was afraid that my eyes had been permanently damaged, until at last I managed to focus them on something closer.

I blinked a hundred times to make sure I was not imagining it—a perfect frozen image of a butterfly. Not living, of course. Perfect only in shape and size and the detail of its patterned wings, for it was carved of the very stuff of winter, a fragile creature of frost. The coloration was quite faint, only a pale suggestion of the radiant reds and yellows and hard-edged black I knew were the reality. But there was such vivid truth in the shaping of it that I held my breath lest it startle, fly into the raging storm, and be shattered.

I wrapped my arms about my shivering self and struggled to my knees, squinting and blinking away my freezing tears so that I could see more. Indeed the butterfly was only the beginning, Perched upon a leafy bush, also carved of ice. Upon the bush were roses in every stage of their blooming from tight-closed promise to the poignant perfection of full bloom, doomed to fade upon the next hour’s passing. The merest hint of pinks and reds, deeply buried in the ice, gave memory to their missing colors, and I sniffed the faintest tinge of sweetness on the air. Was it only my starved imagination that made me smell them.

Beyond the one sculpted bush were thousands more flowering plants of varieties wholly unknown to me, stretching in every direction as far as I could see in the gloomy grayness. And in the midst of them, trees, tall and marvelous, every detail of leaf and branch recorded in exactitude, unmoving despite the raging wind. Winding paths through the frozen garden led to fountains that showered frost-carved droplets in unchanging patterns over images of birds and maidens and children dipping pails into the ever-still water. Delicate bridges arched over frozen ponds.

Perhaps they intend to leave me here
, I thought. I could well have been the bony, battered gargoyle left to frighten evil spirits from their glorious garden. Indeed I was so cold and broken, I could scarcely move, yet in truth the piercing beauty of the frozen images, the unyielding purity of their perfection, took such hold of my withered soul that I did not want to leave.
To die here in beauty. Not so bad a thing.
I had forgotten beauty.

In my childhood, people had told me stories of the demons’ frozen land, but never had I pictured castles and roadways and bridges formed from the ice, much less gardens and butterflies. The bitter cold was the only thing we had right . . . and the monsters in the pits.

The two voices were still whispering of conspiracy and intrigue, but I could see no one about. The lack of substance to my tormentors drove me to despair. All my fighting skills had been useless, and now I was such wreckage, I could likely not lift sword or fist.