Revelation (53 page)

By the time I felt steady enough to face her, she had shifted yet again. She sat at her table, the candlelight reflecting on her lovely face—the older, wiser, more beautiful face I had seen only once before. And Vyx had shown himself. He was standing behind Vallyne protectively, though he didn’t touch her. Rai-kirah never touched one another.

“When one lives a hundred lifetimes in Kir’Vagonoth, one has little experience of trust or friendship,” said Vyx. “You are one of the
pandye gash
—an yddrass. We had no reason to believe you would consent.”

“Be honest, Vyxagallanxchi,” said Vallyne, softly chiding. “You told me he was trustworthy. I would not credit you.” She lifted her chin. “It was I who chose to leave you with the mad ones. I wanted your power, your soul, and your body. I had no use for your mind. Perhaps if I had known you. . . .” As her words faded away, there came a great release, and I lifted my hands and stared at them as if I might see manacles falling away for the second time in my life. And then I shivered and heightened my vision, for the light had dimmed and the bitter cold bit into me as when a winter sun slips below the horizon.

“What’s done is done,” I said, my voice echoing in the void left by the loss of my mad desire. “I’ll take my leave now.”

“Stay, Exile . . . Seyonne . . . will you not hear us out?” Vallyne remained seated. Only her voice reached out to me now. “Have you not seen value here? If not in us, then in what we’ve shown you? If you were willing without our deception . . . then what of now? Our need is no less than if we’d been honest.” No. One could not fault Vallyne for determination. And yet I was surprised. She did not try to bind me with my name.

“I’ve seen what you want me to see. And I’m going to do what you want me to do. I’m just not going to let you control the way it happens.” I started toward the doorway. “You’ll be able to go back to Kir’Navarrin, and perhaps once you’re there, you won’t be forced to do the vile things you do. But my people will also live, and someday they and you will understand what we are and what we’ve done to each other.”

“We protected you,” said Vyx. “You cannot know how many times you came near death from those jealous of your body or bent on vengeance. One or the other of us have been with you almost every moment.”

“You nearly destroyed me.”

“Vallyne allowed you to heal. All those days in her courtyard . . . did you not wonder at them? We had no healing medicines, but she gave you time and peace to mend your body.”

“You stole my will.” I fought my way through the draping veils, yet I seemed to make no progress. I ripped down a filmy trailer of white and spotted the door ten paces away.

Both of them called out. “Wait!” But it was Vyx who vanished, reappearing between me and the door, his light flickering blue-green and purple as he took physical shape again. “One word with you, Exile. I dare not ask whose advice you plan to follow in this venture; I doubt you know enough of the real issues here to make a wise choice. No, no, don’t yell at me that I’ve given you no opportunity to make a choice. Indeed you’ve conveyed that message very clearly. And we repent. Indeed we do. But if you are the man you claim, the one we have judged you to be, are you not the least bit curious about my warning? Have you no mote of misgiving that perhaps you enter into a game where you do not know the stakes?”

There it was. Of course he would touch upon the stone in my boot. I did not want to listen. I had made my decision as best I could, and I needed to be off. “I understand everything I need to. I’ll open the way because it’s right, and I would not condemn any other of my people to do it. I will do my best not to unlock Tyrrad Nor. Whatever comes after, whatever is the ‘danger without a name’ that exists in the fortress, you will have to deal with it.”

“Then, I will say only this, Exile. Everything depends on the one you choose. Everything—the safety of your people, of your child, of all of us. We need an ylad of immense power—you—to open the way to Kir’Navarrin. We are lost otherwise. But you must know the risk. We have no name for what waits for us in Tyrrad Nor; we know only that it means the destruction of your kind and ours. Sooner or later, it will strike. There are those who share this intent, who rejoice in the thought of chaos and destruction and revenge. They are the same who wish to destroy the
pandye gash
and go first into Kir’Navarrin, so they can seek out the danger. Wake it. Serve it. I can tell you more . . .”

I told myself I should not listen to Vyx. He and Vallyne had found it needful that I lie in a pool of my own blood believing I had no arms, that I weep in despair as I felt my mind disintegrate, that I forget the woman I had promised to love until I died and the child who seemed to be the single thing I had ever touched that was not death. Yet I found myself wanting to believe them. “I need to go.” But my feet did not move.

Then Vyx made a mistake. “Tell me one thing only, Exile. Where is the other ylad?”

I did not expect this question, and it reversed my weakening resolve. The two of them were playing games with me again, and I would not permit it. “What business is it of yours?” I said, pushing the slight demon aside. “Were you thinking to destroy what little you left him? Or do you plan to do the same for me—strip me of power because I won’t yield it to you and mutilate my body because you have none of your own?” Vyx’s warnings had no meaning. He admitted their lies and deceptions. I needed to be gone from that place where Vallyne and candlelight, anger and wounded pride were confusing my judgment.

“What we left . . . ? Ah. So Merryt has told you his story of the feasting—how the terrible rai-kirah cut off his fingers and stole his great magic. You see, Vallyne, I told you we should have caged the vermin when we had the chance.”

I touched the brass snake that was the door handle, but yanked my hand away. It was so hot I thought it might sear the imprint of the viper in my palm. “Easy to mock a captive.” I invoked my melydda and touched the snake again. This time I did not feel the heat, and I pulled open the door.

“Shall I show you how it was done, Exile?” said Vyx, pelting me with words. “Shall I tell you why he came to our feasting? And what he did while he was there?”

“No,” said Vallyne, her voice distraught. “I forbid it. Vyx. . . .”

“He needs to learn before he makes his choice.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve learned enough.”

As I strode down the passageway, away from treachery and temptation, Vyx called out after me unrelenting. “Think, Yddrass. How has Merryt survived in Kir’Vagonoth when no other ylad ever has? Where does he get his human clothing and his weapons? Ask him who it is he mourns at his altar—and it is surely not his wife, whom he blames for his captivity, or his people, whom he blames for his failures, nor the rai-kirah, his captors, whom he blames for everything else and who are going mad here in Kir’Vagonoth. Ask him why he has sworn before every one of us to destroy the yddrass who can change form; any rai-kirah can tell you of his vow.”

I would not listen. They were out to ruin my mind again, just when I had found some resolution. I hurried to my room, lit a candle, and ate a chunk of hard, sour bread left from some long-forgotten meal. The food did not quiet the gnawing in my stomach. My back itched with sweat. Beyond the rug stuffed in my window, the wind bellowed like a drunken god, but I ripped the dusty wad of carpet away, yanked open the shutters, and leaned through the rectangular opening, taking great gulps of the frigid air as if it might settle my jangled nerves. Why had I set a two-hour delay before my meeting with Gennod? Had I thought to bed Vallyne before . . . oh, gods, what was I doing?

Viciously I shoved the glass-shelved cabinet out of my way. As cups and jewelry and pots bumped and clattered to the floor, each article shattering into a thousand bits, I fell on my bed and buried my face in the coverings. I couldn’t bear to think. The wind howled, fluttering the pages of a book that lay beside my ear. The god stories. What had I been trying to remember . . . about Verdonne and Valdis and the myth of the first Ezzarians? Our race had sprung from the uniting of gods and mortals, so we had been told. And the god had gone mad from jealousy and vengeance. When Valdis stripped the angry god of his power, he had locked him away in a magical fortress and pronounced a warning to all the peoples of the forest . . . a warning . . . because he had taken away his father’s name . . . What was the truth and what was wishing—recreating the world to fit our desire, the attempt to shape our formless midnight fears and mask them with the protection of a benevolent god?

A man-high candlestick toppled when a gust from the window pushed the crumpled rug against it. All the candles were snuffed out. I jumped up and threw on my cloak, then raced down the shifting passageways to the back door Merryt had shown me. Once outside in the gloom, I triggered the change that gave me wings and fought my way through the raging storm to the Rudai settlement.

 

Only a few passing demons gave me a glance as I strode down the winding corridors of gray-lit stone. No one noticed me push open the door of Merryt’s secret room; though my shoulders were still tingling, my wings were hidden again. The Ezzarian had sworn that no one knew of this place.

I poked around the bins and baskets of his little hoard, fingering gemstones and combs, cups and pens, a packet of needles, and bits of cloth and thread. Then, disgusted with my cowardly dawdling, I dropped to my knees in front of the brassbound trunk from which Merryt had taken his Warden’s cloak. I would find nothing. The demons were master deceivers and were only trying to make me doubt myself. The lock was sealed with enchantment. I had no patience to unravel it, so instead I burst the hinges and ripped the lid away.

What story can be told by a heap of rags? I had once seen rags piled higher than a roof, and they had spoken of mortal suffering and grief—the garments of a town of plague victims ready to be burned. Ysanne had tucked away a small stack of fine-woven cloth in the bottom of our clothes chest, deep down under the winter cloaks we seldom needed in Ezzaria. I had found the little pile—the ritual garments she had made for our child’s naming day—when hunting a clean shirt on the day of my trial before the Council. In my blind and cruel anger, I had left them in a wadded heap on the floor for her to see. The rags in Merryt’s chest had a story, too.

One by one I pulled them out. A Warden’s cloak ripped and half burned. Another Warden’s cloak with gaping holes in it, the cloth eaten away by whatever acrid substance had made the stiff, splotchy green stains. A shredded tunic, embroidered with the intertwined symbols of Warden and Aife, and husband and wife, the fine stitching telling a story of love and partnership. A single scuffed boot with the name Dyadd scratched inside. A sweat-crusted shirt, sized for a giant of a man, with a jagged rent in the back of it, edged with rusty brown. One after the other I examined them. Merryt had worn the ones he could repair. These that were left—the garments of no fewer than fifteen Wardens—were too ruined, but evidently he could not bring himself to destroy them. I pulled out one shirt that was in fairly good condition. A little blood. A few rips, easily mended. But, of course, he could not have worn that one while I still lived. It was the shirt I had bought in Passile on my journey with Fiona. I tried to persuade myself that Merryt had kept the clothes in honored memory of those he could not save . . . but the testimony of my own shirt proved otherwise. On the second day of my captivity in the pits of the mad Gastai, that garment had been stripped from me by a soft-voiced man who had taught my jailers how to inflict obscene indignity—a human man.

I twisted the coarse fabric into a knot about my fist and hammered the wall.
Fool. Cursed, blind fool.

“We should have told you about him.”

I didn’t even jump when Vyx spoke from behind me. I was numb to surprises. “I should have seen it,” I said.

“You wanted a friend in this terrible place. And he told you a story . . .”

Yes. A story. The residents of Kir’Vagonoth were all quite proficient at their lies.

“I can tell you another version of that story, though Vallyne commands me not.”

“I don’t want anything from you.” Nothing that would tell me the magnitude of my misjudgment.

“But we need you to see . . .” Vyx moved quickly. As he had done as Raddoman, when he told me the tale of his terrible waking in Kir’Vagonoth, Vyx clamped his hand across my face and in a fleeting moment—
my body shuddering with power . . . my head swelled with wine, my belly and my loins engorged . . . my hands thrumming with a god’s mastery, life and death within my grasp . . . fading glimpses of women and men naked on the grass . . . bleeding . . . dead . . . We’d had a jolly hunt such as the world had never known; across the hills and through my grandsire’s woodland we had chased the pitiful villagers, some screaming, some in the desperate silence that was so pleasing . . . my besotted friends laughing with me
—he took me into his memory.