Revelation (59 page)

“You’re going to do this thing . . . unlock the darkness that we saw in the mosaic.” Fiona had followed me.

“I’m going to unlock the portal to Kir’Navarrin, yes. But the evil . . . Whatever it is, it’s also locked away. The blot we saw in the mosaic is a fortress beyond the gateway, and I’m going to do my best to keep it secure. Merryt wishes otherwise, and that’s why we can’t let him in.”

“Before you do it, I have to show you something,” said Fiona. “It fell out of Balthar’s pocket yesterday when I put him to sleep.” From her own tunic she withdrew a wad of dirty cloth just larger than her hand. As she pulled away the cloth to expose its contents, she looked toward me, as if to ask whether I understood what it was. Three shards of chipped stone, flat on the back, colored very simply. Fiona had arranged the three pieces to fit together along the interior breaks, forming a painted square outlined in red.

“The fourth square. The fourth vision of the Seer.”

Fiona nodded and continued to hold it steady as I sought the meaning. In truth, its puzzle was the simplest to unravel of all the mosaic. The interior of the square was completely black, a midnight ebony that might have been a shaft penetrating the bowels of the earth or the sky behind the glimmering stars. I touched the broken tile and felt the blood leave my face—my guilt-marked face still hidden behind the shadows of my hood. I had lived in that darkness, the remnant of overriding nothingness where the mad Gastai had shaped a prison to their liking. Fiona, in maintaining her connection with me through my time of torment, had touched it, too, and I felt her quivering revulsion as she gazed upon the square. But what I had survived and she had touched was only a small part of what was to come.

“What is it? Is it the place where you were? It feels the same. Is this what you call Kir’Navarrin?”

“All this is but legend,” said Balthar, who had come up behind Fiona. “Seeings are not truth, not in the way we think of truth. They are only possibilities.” The old man’s arms were wrapped around his belly, and his eyes were fixed on the chips of stone. He was near weeping. “It could all be wrong.”

I laid a hand on Balthar’s arm, trying to comfort him, even as the words rose up from the depths of my memory. “Woe to the man who unlocks the prison of the Nameless God, for there will be such a wrath of fire and destruction laid upon the earth as no mortal being can imagine. And it will be called the Day of Ending, the last day of the world.”

“That’s from the story of Verdonne and Valdis,” said Fiona, puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know.” My theories were too vague and ill formed to speak of as yet. But as I looked upon the tile and ran my fingers around the red border, the ancient artifact became familiar, as if I had played a role in its shaping. It was with conviction that I continued. “Fazzia envisioned the winged man unlocking the gateway—remember that he was on the
outside
of the gateway with the key—and she envisioned this dreadful ending. But one vision does not follow from the other. Balthar is right that prophecies are only possibilities. Warnings. I believe that this results only if the fortress itself is unlocked. Remember they had lived alongside the fortress for a long time. The mosaic shows that they moved freely between this world and Kir’Navarrin.” I tapped my finger on the black tile. “This does not mean that I’ll do the deed, or that I’m wrong to try to heal the wound we caused.”

Fiona shook her head. “But these elders would know such things about prophecy. If it was only a warning . . . unlikely to happen . . . then why would they destroy themselves?”

“Think of it, Fiona. A Seer has these visions . . . a woman well-known for the accuracy and wisdom of her insights. Imagine how the elders felt . . . that one of their own could be the cause of such horror as this. So how do they make the world safe? Remove the ability to shift, and you will never have a man with wings to unlock anything.”

Balthar nodded slightly. “And destroy all records of the place, eradicate every memory of it, and no one will ever try to go back and take the risk. It is far easier to hide from a disaster than to decide how to prevent it or to remedy it.”

“Exactly. Only we didn’t count on the result,” I said. “The great flaw in our plan. The piece of ourselves we ripped away didn’t die. Thus the demon war and our responsibility to fight it. Us alone. And without understanding, lest we cause the very thing we set out to prevent.” I shook my head with the irony of it. “You can’t hide from true prophecy. With all their work, their pain, their terrible choices . . . we stand at this place anyway. All we can do is try to put things right.” Such a surge of longing came over me that I could scarcely speak. “We remember, and we want to go home. We must go back.”

“Go home? Go back? So you’re not just opening the gateway for Blaise.” Slowly Fiona folded the dirty kerchief over the artifact, fixing her eyes upon it as she did so. “ ‘We remember . . . We want . . .’ We.”

The round-faced old man gaped at me. “Fazzia! How did you know the Seer’s name? I only discovered it a few weeks ago. It was not in any of our lore. All these years we thought the Seer was called Eddaus, but I found out he was only the scribe. Your interpretation does make sense. Of course it would be the elders of the people who would decide on such a drastic course of action. I’ve hidden this tile all these months. It was too terrible to think about. And then this girl tells me that you are the one with wings and were speaking of ‘opening a gateway.’ I came near prostration with it. All this you’ve discovered . . . was it from the demons that you learned it? Can it be believed?”

Balthar’s prattling might have continued forever. But I wasn’t listening. Rather, I was watching Fiona. A warm wind caught a few strands of her dark hair and whipped them in her face—her grave, still face with lips pressed tightly together. She tied the string around the bundle and gave it to Balthar, then raised her eyes to me. “Take off your cloak, Seyonne. It’s autumn in southern Manganar. Why would you need it?” Her voice was quiet. Expressionless.

I had known she would not be put off. Whatever dogged question had kept her with me all these months would be answered the moment I lowered my hood. I had not Blaise’s skill to mask what I had become. She would name me Abomination—the ultimate corruption of a Warden—and she would leave. I hated the thought of it. But I could not lie to one who had held faithful for so long. “I didn’t want to disturb you with things that cannot be undone.”

“Disturb me or disgust me?”

Balthar looked from one to the other of us as if trying to discover where he had lost track of the conversation.

“It’s the only way, Fiona. Believe me when I say this: with everything I have been, I wish the answer could have been other. But I have to do what I believe right, what is necessary . . .”

“ . . . no matter who it destroys.” Her composure was like a silken garment, fitted so tightly that I could see her fury ready to burst through. “You’re going to take the demons through this portal.”

“I hope that there will be a great deal more saving than destruction. That’s the whole idea.”

“Show me.”

“As you wish.” I lowered my hood and faced her only long enough to glimpse her thin face redrawn by shock and revulsion . . . then I closed my eyes, folded my arms upon my chest, and transformed.

From the first day I had shaped my wings beyond the portal, when I was a cocky young Warden of eighteen, my most profound desire had been to take flight into a brilliant morning of the human world. Yet I could take no joy from it on that bright morning in Manganar. Not when I looked down and saw Fiona turn her head away, and Kyor restraining Blaise as the mad outlaw cried out after me in agonized yearning. Only Balthar the Villain stood gaping and grinning, his sin at last eclipsed by someone else’s.

No point in going back. Kyor would keep Blaise where he was until time to move him to the gateway. Fiona would run back to the Ezzarians and tell them of corruption fulfilled. Best to get on with the impossibilities of the day.

I flew high above the arid grassland that was scarred so strangely with the double white line of the pillars, looking to see how much time I had to work on the gateway. Not long. Twelve leagues west of the pillars was a rolling cloud of dust, a sizable force—perhaps seven hundred mounted warriors. Three banners. At least three Derzhi houses in rebellion. It was inconceivable. Ten leagues northeast was a smaller cloud of dust—perhaps five hundred . . . but the banners told me they were Aleksander’s prize troops, and the Prince’s own pennant flapped boldly at the front. They would all be in place by nightfall, when the restless fears and angers of battle’s eve would give the demon legion the opening they had planned. It was tempting to fly south to seek signs of the Ezzarian passage through the mountains, but it was more important to unravel the enchantments of the gate. Not all of them. Just enough that I could finish the job quickly when the time came. I had no idea what I was going to do about the Ezzarians as yet.

I touched earth at the southernmost pair of pillars. Sixty such pairs of pillars stretched before me for a quarter of a league across the rolling sea of golden, knee-high grass. To unravel the enchantments binding this vast forest of stone was a daunting prospect, especially as I had not the least idea how to begin.

I should have known the answer would come. It was the reason I had done the unthinkable. I walked to the first pillar and examined the band of characters carved into the white stone. It was gibberish.

“You have my eyes. Use them. Tell me what it means.”

I closed my eyes and wrestled with anger, forcing away the memory of Fiona’s horror, trying not to imagine what it was she had seen: pale blue fire in my eye sockets where there should be Ezzarian black. Did she smell me, too? Had she heard the soul-devouring music lapping at the edges of my words? Seen gut-twisting gold light at the edges of my body?

I forced my eyes to relax. To let go. With conscious will I relinquished my hands and my tongue and the melydda that I had carried with me since I first breathed the air of the world. I gave them all up to service the work I had chosen, and when I opened my eyes again, the words and symbols scribed on the pillar made perfect sense.

 

 

 

The shadows were long on the brown hills the next time I looked out from the line of pillars, and my mind was awash in enchantment. Never had I imagined the kind of complexity used to seal the Kir’Navarrin gateway: tangled intricacies of words and gestures, senses and abstractions, mental acrobatics so strenuous that demon combat seemed tame. I had to cast fragile lines of magical commands into the teeming ocean of enchantments that comprise the natural world, wait until I felt a response no easier to notice than the pressure of a snowflake landing on my hair, then snatch it in before a gnat could twitch its eye, and weave the answer into the key that I was building.

Of course, it is easy to say that I was the one who did all this, but, in truth, it was the demon. He wielded my sight and hearing, my touch and taste and smell in this combat of sorcery as a Derzhi warrior uses his sword, his horse, his body, knife, and whip to define and encompass the art of war. Though I brought my own mind and experience to bear upon the problems we had to solve, I neither moved nor spoke without his bidding, and the farther we progressed through the sixty pairs of pillars, the more completely I was forced to rely upon his instruction. If ever a being was born to ride a horse or rule an empire, I believed it was Aleksander; but if ever one was born to wield melydda, it was Denas.

“Vyx?”

Vyx is not the fool he appears . . .
He said no more than this. Articulated words were becoming less necessary as the hours of our joining accumulated. A single thought from either of us would open up the associated portion of memory, understanding, and knowledge to the other. With this brief reference to the mischievous architect of my corruption, I learned that Vyx could have accomplished the work we had just done in half the time it had taken us, and that if any being, mortal or immortal, could prevent the breach of the fortress, it was the slender, teasing demon. The easy acquisition of such understanding did not preclude astonishment at the revelation.

I was mortally tired. I could not remember when I had last slept. My head was swimming with the enchantments I had learned in the past hours, a level of complexity the finest Ezzarian scholars had never imagined. And my stomach was gnawing on itself, having had nothing in it for far too long. But before trying to deal with hunger and steal some rest, I needed to see how the landscape of disaster had changed in the hours I had worked.

There were too many eyes about to consider my usual form, so I searched out what new knowledge I might have of shapeshifting. My demon partner did not deign to speak—his disdain of flesh was doubled for beastflesh. But after a number of false starts and considerable discomfort, I managed to conjure myself the body of a falcon . . . and instantly believed I’d made a terrible mistake. I came near choking with the panicked suffocation of close confinement. But it was only for a moment, until I experienced the efficiencies of a body shaped for flight and the usefulness of eyes designed to see the small creatures scuttering through the dry grass far below—creatures that quickly satisfied the cravings of my empty stomach. I smiled inside my feathered head. Soldiers’ eyes would be turned to the sky, watching for omens. Seeing a falcon, the symbol of Aleksander’s house, might give the rebels pause.