Revelation (61 page)

When Aleksander returned a few moments later, he was altogether more ready to listen to what I had to say. “It’s not the Hamraschi attacking, is it?”

“No, my lord. As I told you.”

“Sovari sends word the Thrid mercenaries are about to desert, claiming our venture is ill omened. They’ve never seen so many evil spirits on the night before a battle. Their shaman is bleeding at the eyes from trying to banish them. One of Gezza’s warriors has fallen on his sword from unnamed terror, and everyone is complaining of nightmares. Evil spirits . . . demons.” He pointed to his patterned rug. “Sit down here and tell me what’s happening, Seyonne.”

Even as he tried to draw me from my hiding place, I shrank back farther. Aleksander had lived a horror no man should ever experience, when the Lord of Demons had gnawed away half his soul to make a dwelling place, then taken up residence there. If the Prince saw what I was, I would never get him to believe me. “I’ve no time to explain it all, my lord, but you must reassure your warriors. There’s no threat—”

“No threat? But you said the conflict was not of human making.” I thought Aleksander might pull down his tent poles in exasperation.

“Exactly so—but the purposes of this onslaught have nothing to do with human grievance. I beg you trust me. I’ve learned a great deal since I first taught you of rai-kirah. Don’t sleep tonight. Go out and reassure your men. Send word to the rebel leaders to do the same. Tell them that this unsettled night is but the work of the Yvor Lukash and will be finished with the morrow, for you will hand him over to show that you keep your promises.” I breathed a silent prayer that Vyx was correct when he assured me that it would only take one night for the demons to pass the gateway. Certainly my own work would be finished by then, for good or ill. “Before midday tomorrow I’ll come back here, and you can do with me as you will. Your barons will not want to cross a man who can bring such a night to a peaceful end.”

He thought about it so long, I wanted to shake him. “You’ll not betray me again?” he said at last.

“You bear the light of destiny within you, my lord. Even if I cared nothing for you, I’m sworn to protect you. But you read the hearts of men better than any sorcerer, so you already know the truth of mine.”

He walked slowly to the door of the tent. “Midday tomorrow, Seyonne. Don’t be late.” It was a command and a warning. But it was also a plea. He was asking me . . . willing me . . . to be what he wanted and not what he feared. I would not fail him.

I pulled aside the curtained door and watched the Prince give orders to his guard captain Sovari, then head toward three soldiers who were standing guard duty by cowering in the corner of the horse pen, their drawn weapons shaking. When the Prince approached and spoke to them, the men jumped up, their backs straight. I had to trust him to do what was needed. Aleksander was undiplomatic, unsympathetic, and ignorant when it came to most concerns of ordinary people, but he knew how to deal with his warriors.

Now can we leave this useless babbling and get back to the gateway? We must start the legion moving through before the
pandye gash
arrive.

A number of warriors’ legends were born that night. With Denas’s urgency driving me to hurry, I stood hidden in the shadowed doorway and shaped wings, then called the wind and shot upward into the moonlight. Only when I heard a “bloody Athos, save us” far below me, did I realize that I had forgotten to use the form of a bird.

 

 

 

I streaked for the ruin, speeding westward through the moonlight toward the pillars. The campfires of the Derzhi lay behind me, so it was with apprehension that I noted the new lights flickering in the distance to my left. From the south—the mountains. Ezzarians were two hours away, three at most. I prayed that Vyx had arrived, and that the last pattern of the enchantment was no worse than I had judged. Half an hour more, perhaps.

Vyx had not yet come, but Kyor was coaxing a stumbling Blaise up the last steep pitch of the path to the ruin. I touched feet to earth and ignored the silent protests of my demon partner as I went to help the boy, taking a part of the bigger man’s weight to get him up the hill. Kyor stared at me for a moment, then wrenched his eyes away and urged Blaise to another step.

“You must persuade him to walk the whole length of the gateway,” I said. “Once we’ve got him through, I need you to get a message to Farrol. Listen well . . . and you, too, Blaise, if you can hear me. There must be no more raids for a while. I’ve made a start at getting what you want . . .” As we climbed the gentle slope, I told the two of them about Aleksander. About the promise I’d seen in him when I lived under his yoke, and about the bargain I’d made with him in the hour past. “He will do as he says as long as I meet him at the time we agreed. None of you will be harmed. But you must hold back and learn of him. He’ll protect you, he’ll learn from you, and he will change the world. Do you understand, Kyor?”

“I’ll tell Farrol to hold off. I’ll convince him.”

A shudder rippled through Blaise and left his head bobbing. I rubbed his head and laughed. “So you hear me, too. Is that it? We will do this. We will.”

We crested the hill, and I shifted Blaise’s weight back to the youth. “I hate to leave you, but by the time you get him to the northern end, I’ll have it open. Someone should be there to help him on the other side of it.”

“I’ll take him through myself.” The boy blew a strand of dark hair out of his own face and took firmer hold of the slumping Blaise.

“Are you sure, Kyor? We don’t know—”

“I told him I’d do as you bade me. As soon as we find this Well of the Spirits, I’ll get back to Farrol. You can depend on it.”

I smiled at the boy. “You’re going to save him. The world will thank you for it.”

As he urged Blaise onward, Kyor called softly over his shoulder. “I hope it doesn’t pain you overmuch . . . what you’ve done.”

“It’s no matter,” I said. “Keep Blaise alive and remind him of my price. He must learn to work with Prince Aleksander; it will be even more important when this is over. Don’t let him forget.”

The boy nodded, and the two of them staggered southward, the boy talking softly and constantly to the failing man.

I flew to the northernmost pillars and decided I couldn’t wait for Vyx. We needed to be ready, so I buried myself in enchantment once again. The last pattern was terrifically complex, and though I tried to stay aware of any threat from my surroundings, I could not afford any slip of concentration.

The moon had risen high over the pillars by the time the shining key was complete, perfect in its outline, the silver surface hard, smooth, flawless . . . ready. Before me wavered a portal, not the rectangular doorway of an Aife’s weaving, but a new pair of pillars, identical in every respect to the sixty pairs beside and behind me. Between the pillars was nothing. Beyond them was nothing. Entry was still locked, barred, sealed with ancient power, and though I held the enchanted key in my mind, I had no idea how to use it.

“Tell me, demon. We’ve come this far. You must know what’s next.”

“My will . . . ” The only thing I’d not yet yielded. He wanted everything.

I had done the unthinkable, mutilated myself, made myself anathema. And now he was demanding that I take the final step—and trust a demon’s word that I would ever again be able to utter a word or perform an act of my own choosing.

Was it his bitterness or my own that shriveled my tongue? None of it mattered, of course. Once he posed the question, he knew my answer. “Do with me as you will.”

And he did. Like a Suzaini woman shoved out of her family’s councils when her son’s new wife is brought into the household, I receded into a corner of my mind with nothing to do but watch Denas work. Deftly he wove a pattern of light between the two new pillars and used my melydda to infuse the pattern with power. As he held the structure in mind, it reformed itself—whirling, surging, coiling upon its center, shaping an empty slot, a void as starkly incomplete as an empty eye socket. Then carefully, precisely, Denas retrieved his shining key from the depths of our mind and positioned it in the slot, and with our hands and our voice and our will, he drew down lightning to seal it there.

I had never felt such power as that which poured out of me in that hour. From body and mind, voice and hand it came in a thundering river, until I thought my very soul would be sucked out along with it. My heart seized in my chest. I could get no breath. As the nothingness in the reflected portal resolved into a night sky and an alien earth, into trees and hills and a dusty road turned white by moonlight, the demon’s triumph raged through me like fire consumes a dry forest.

“Gods of night . . . breathe!” I slipped to my knees, and my vision failed, and the giant’s hand gripping my chest squeezed out the last of life. “Help me . . .” I had no will to help myself. Whether he took note of my cry or discovered my distress on his own, the air quickly began flowing again. I gasped and coughed, and my hands clawed at my chest as the bloodless stricture eased. I was so drained of melydda, I could not have conjured a dust mote.

And indeed it was. Like the reflection in a pond of perfect stillness, the entire line of pillars was now doubled in its length, stretching into a moonlit nightscape of grassy hills and silvered ponds. The scent of wildflowers drifted through the square gateway that was formed by the last two pillars of the world I walked and the first two pillars of Kir’Navarrin. A magnificent buck with antlers as wide as my arm span raised his head from a small pool in languid curiosity, and two does wandered down a hill to drink beside him. Myriad bright stars struggled to outshine a double-sized moon, stars laid in patterns that were familiar, though they were not the patterns I had studied as a boy in Ezzaria. The gateway would stand open until the dawn closed it again.

Ah, Vallyne. To see this wonder with you
. The vision of our homeland so close flooded my mind with remembrance of her bright music and her beautiful face, alight with intelligence and wit. I came near crying out with the piercing torment of desire: unable all these years to touch her in a way that could give her pleasure or to satisfy my own need without causing her grief. Beyond this gateway was the truth of her; was she my wife or lover as I had always believed, or was she a stranger I had never known until I found her in the dark winds of Kir’Vagonoth, laughing in defiance of her fate? A perilous journey to learn the truth . . . for once through the gateway, I would no longer be myself. I would be lost in the ylad, drowned in flesh and soul, and so I—the one who had loved her for a thousand years—would never know the answer, or if I knew it, would never be able to act upon it.
What justice in this cruel universe condemns a being to such bitter ending?

Confused, astonished, I shied away from these shattering images, shaking my head as if to confuse them or obscure them with the other debris floating in my head. These grieving torments were not mine—not Seyonne’s. My own longings for Vallyne had been but the products of enchantment, fed by loneliness and longing for a touch of beauty amid the desolation of my life. Yet even as I averted my inner eyes from Denas’s raw and gaping wound, I realized that it was my own will that I do so. I had choices again.

“I never wanted to know these things. I have no right.”

“I’m sorry.”

I tried to forget what I had seen and felt—my own violation of a realm where I had no place. Behind my back waited the dangerous world that I had shut out while I worked enchantment. And when I turned around to reenter it, I grinned. Kyor, his dark hair plastered to his face in a sheen of sweat, was no more than fifty paces behind me. He was breathless with exertion—Blaise was little more than dead-weight upon the slight youth’s shoulders—but Kyor’s dark eyes were fixed upon the gateway, shining with hope and excitement.

I hurried toward the pair and was some ten paces away when Kyor halted abruptly, his eyes widened in surprise, and he opened his mouth as if to speak. But no words came out. Only dark blood—bubbling from his lips and trickling down his chin. He took another step, tugging on Blaise, but the bigger man slipped out of the boy’s grasp and slumped to the ground. Young Kyor shook his head, then pitched forward on top of Blaise, a dagger hilt protruding from the boy’s slim back.

“No!” My bellow might have crumbled a lesser structure than Dasiet Homol. I ran toward the two of them, spinning as I moved, peering into the shadows of the pillars, trying to see what murderous devil had so violated an innocent youth. “Oh, gods of the universe, no!” I dropped to my knees and laid hands on Kyor, but felt no beat of life. Only warm wetness. Blood. Everywhere. Frantically I worked the knife from his back and gently rolled the boy into my arms. Nothing to be done. Nothing. Not even time to chant his death song. “I will sing for you, child. On the soul of my own son, I will.”