Revelation (47 page)

“No. I’ve come here to learn, as I said. It’s important that I understand how we came to be at war. My people have no tale of it. No memory of it. No writing or picture to tell us. So what do your stories tell?”

“It is no story, ylad. We remember. We lived in Kir’Navarrin in the light. We had our own bodies, and we knew who we were. And when came the terror and the dark times, we found ourselves here in Kir’Vagonoth. Would I could make every one of you
pandye gash
live the dark times as we did.” He turned to go, his stink wafting through the room.

I was right. Kir’Navarrin was much more than the realm of the soul—the landscape of demon combat. “Teach me, Raddoman. I want to learn. I want to understand.”

Raddoman shifted slowly to his demon image, his bearded face and hot blue eyes now facing me again, though he had not turned around. With a sigh—of satisfaction, it seemed—he bowed. “As you wish, ylad.” He extended his hand toward my face, forcing me backward until I sat on my bed, jammed against the wall . . . until his wide palm covered my eyes and nose and mouth, the light-sculpted flesh closing off smell and speech and the gray light of the castle . . . I could not move, and the darkness deepened, suffocating . . . paralyzing . . .

 

Hopeless, lonely grief was devouring my spirit as the light came back—the cold gray light of Kir’Vagonoth that was the very essence of despair. My fall into the pits had only approximated the moment of desolation I had just lived. Such loss. Such hunger. Physical life vanished in an instant. The only sound the wind, and the faint wailing of other lost souls. For a thousand years to have all the demands of bodily existence—hunger, thirst, desire—but nothing to soothe them. The demons had shaped their present existence from distorted memory and the stolen lives brought them by the Gastai. Holy Verdonne, what had we done to ourselves . . . and to the world, which had borne the burden of our deeds?

I slumped against the chilly wall, drained, sober. The demon form shimmered in the doorway, turned where I could see nothing but his light. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I didn’t know. None of us know.”

“Gather the circle,” said the demon softly. “It was all we could think. But it was a very long time before we found the others of our circles. We could not recognize our kin. Even now . . . Denas himself could be my brother or my father or my son, but I would not know it. Only the bond of the circle did we know. When we gathered at last, the hunters went out to find something to feed us as they had ever done, though what they found was not what we expected. Not meat or drink, but images of life—sounds and sensations and memories from bodies that were not our own, but could be given us to share. What they bring satisfies our hungers . . . some hungers that we never knew before and never wanted to know, for those depraved sensations are so powerful and the easiest to harvest. And so we have survived, except that your kind—the ylad
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—fight them and kill them or force them to return to this realm broken, as if they were in those dark times again and again. Do you understand, Exile? It is your own evils and your own war that have corrupted the Gastai until they are gone to ruin. It is clear that you—the
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—are the same who sent us here, and why else would you do it, but to take Kir’Navarrin for your own?”

“But we don’t live in Kir’Navarrin. We don’t even know where it is.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps you’re afraid of what you would find in Tyrrad Nor. Perhaps your people know what is the danger and wait for us to go back and fight it for you. Or perhaps there never was any such thing, and it is a tale you told us to get us out.”

“Tyrrad Nor—the Last Fortress. What is it?”

“As I told you, we don’t know. You took that from us, too. But we lived alongside it once, and we will do so again. We will chance any danger to get our homeland back again, if not the lives you stole from us. We wish to survive. We have no choice. Now I need to be off. The lady calls.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. What more useless words could a man utter? “We don’t know any of this. Whoever made you forget did the same to us. All these years we’ve been fighting, when we are the victims of the same deeds.”

“Just think of it,” he said as he stepped into the passage. “When we leave Kir’Vagonoth behind, it’s you who’ll be left here alone. You and the other ylad. And there’ll be no one to feed you, and no one to tell you your name.”

“Will you ask the lady if I can see her?”

“She won’t. I told you. Not until the reading time.”

“Ask her, if you would, please. I’m anxious to speak with her about these things.”

“I’ll ask.” Raddoman’s brown-gray light vanished.

So much to consider. And even in this memory I had lived was the hint of the threat. What was the Last Fortress? What was the danger that had no name—the “danger from the beginning of the world?”

 

I waited for nearly an hour, but the servant did not return. Other than Vallyne, Raddoman, and the unapproachable Denas, I had exchanged no word with any demon. I didn’t even know how to find most of the ones I’d seen, much less which of them might be receptive to my questioning. So, impatient to get on with my long delayed quest, I set off in search of someone I knew how to question. Merryt.

I had no idea how to find Merryt’s rooms. I had been too confused and ill when he had brought me from the pits. But he still carried messages for Gennod, and I knew where Gennod lived. It was only a matter of waiting until the Ezzarian showed up. I crept through the castle with caution, a tactic wholly unlike my oblivious wanderings of the past weeks. How could I have been so completely mesmerized by the demon woman, so careless? To forget all those I cared for. To forget my training. Swearing to harden my heart and my resolve, I waited in the dark behind a spiral column outside Gennod’s chambers until I saw the Ezzarian come out.

“You’ll see the message delivered, ylad.” Red light flickered in the gloomy doorway. “Rhadit is waiting. I’ll tolerate no delays.”

“Of course, good Gennod,” said the big man. He bowed respectfully and limped down the corridor, muttering under his breath. I stepped out of the shadows to intercept him. “Exile!” He was genuinely surprised.

“I’d like to talk,” I said.

“I’m surprised to see you off your leash.” He pointed down a spiral stair. “Let’s go somewhere private, eh? When a fellow starts lurking in niches, one gets the idea he’s got something on his mind.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble with your master. This is the only place I knew where I might find you.”

Merryt glanced up and down the passage, then grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me close, whispering in my ear. “Gennod is
not
my master. He keeps up the appearance of it to put off his rivals. We have some interests in common at present, that’s all. A Warden must look to his oath now and then, even if it doesn’t seem to matter much, eh? Or have you forgotten your oath while you dally with the beauteous Vallyne? I saved your life, Exile, and what have I got for it?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you in the gallery,” I said as we entered the rooms where he had gotten me washed and dressed for my first meeting with Denas and Vallyne. “I’ve had a lot on my mind that wasn’t of my own choosing. It’s only in the past hours I’ve come to myself again.”

He thrust a number of oddly colored pillows out of the way, and we settled ourselves by his hearth. “Mind-stealing, is it? I warned you.” He tossed in two handfuls of wood scraps from a tarnished brass bin, and sparked a fire. “So what do you want with me? I’d come to think you felt no need of corrupted brothers.”

“I’d like to talk to you about the reasons I came here.”

“Ah. So I’m to hear the great secret at last?”

“I can tell you some of it.” Actually, I told Merryt a great deal: about my meeting with Vyx beyond the portal and the dreams he had sent me, of how I had been forbidden to fight, about the mosaic and my beliefs about the demons, and a general description of my experiences with Denas and Vallyne. Not everything. Nothing of Fiona. Nothing of Blaise or my son or how close I had come to surrendering my soul. Nothing I wanted to keep private from anyone, demon or human. I just hoped that perhaps the Ezzarian could give me a few answers I could understand. In my telling I came full circle to the essential question. “So what . . . where . . . is Kir’Navarrin?” I said. “Raddoman says that the demons once lived there, and we threw them out of it and into this horror of an existence. Vallyne says that her garden is the image of it.” Only as I described it for Merryt had I realized that everything in Vallyne’s garden could be found portrayed in the mosaic—the trees, the flowers, even the layout of the roads—but not in the foreground. Only beyond the faint rectangular images of the portals. I could not sit still as I thought of it, but jumped to my feet and paced the length of Merryt’s room as I told my story. “Denas and his fellow conspirator believe I can open the way to it. Can I?”

The Ezzarian listened carefully to everything, poking idly at the edge of the fire with his boot, rubbing the stumps of his missing fingers with his wide thumbs, his rugged square face settled in sober concentration. “Not right now,” he said. “But you could. You wouldn’t like the learning how, I would guess. But any Ezzarian with melydda enough could serve their need. No . . . the worrisome thing is what Vallyne and her friends are planning. There’s more to it than the opening . . .” He looked up at me, narrowing his dark, angled eyes, as if he’d not quite ever noticed my face before. “They believe they can force you to it. They see something in you . . . a man who claims he’s come willing to the demon realm . . . Who, of any of us in Kir’Vagonoth, could know what to make of such a one?” He paused for a while, staring at me, then shifted his posture, settling back on his cushions as if he had come to some internal resolution. “Let me tell you a little tale. I thought we had some time to learn how things are like to fall out among the devils, but it appears that matters are getting out of hand. I think it’s time we take charge of events ourselves.”

The neglected fire snapped and settled into pulsing coals as he continued. “The demons dearly want to get back to Kir’Navarrin. They say it’s where they came from—maybe we did, too, or maybe not; I don’t take to that part of your tale. I am not one-half of a cursed demon. But they’re set on going back. They think that once they’re home, they’ll be warm and taste their food and recognize their kin. But there’s something blocking their way.”

“Which is?”

“Us. Ezzarians.” He dropped his voice almost out of hearing, drawing me close until I was sitting on the cushions beside him, peering right into his broad face. “What would the Queen of Ezzaria and her Wardens and Weavers do if there came a demon legion riding into the world? All of them invading human souls at once?”