Revelation (66 page)

Drych hurried over to Merryt, dropped his weapon, and fell to his knees. “I’ll get you out, brother. Are you badly—?”

As the boy bent over the wounded man, Merryt laid a hand on Drych’s sword and transformed it into a forearm-long dagger.

“Watch out!” I yelled . . . too late.

The snarling man shoved the blade into the young Warden’s belly, then pushed the limp body off himself and rolled to his side in the ash. “I’ll take what vengeance I can, friend Seyonne. The world will reap the harvest of this night for a thousand years. Your wife will bleed you for this, and the rai-kirah will have their way with the rest of the Ezzarians.” Merryt started laughing, blood spurting from his lips in company with gasping, grotesque guffaws. “You’ve opened the way. Someday soon the Nameless will be free. He will rewrite the story of the world in terror, and he will bring its end in blood and fire and madness.” He pointed a shaking finger at me. “And no one will ever know the truth. They will name you Abomination forever.”

I willed enough blood to stay in my body to move three steps, raise my sword, and cut off Merryt’s grinning head. Then I fell to my knees beside the fallen Drych, woozy, breathless, the world spinning and pulsing, my hands and feet already numb. The boy was still.

Ah, sweet Verdonne
. So many things left undone. There was no help for most of them, but one . . . one duty I could not ignore were the beasts of the netherworld devouring my flesh. With every breath I could summon, I began to sing the Ezzarian death chant, raising my voice—no, it was Denas’s voice, for it was clear and melodious, speaking everything of sorrow that I had never had the words or music to shape—for Kyor and Drych and Tegyr and Nestayo, and for Blaise who lay in madness and my son and the others who would follow him . . . and for Ysanne, who would now know that her Wardens were dead. I sang every word of it. Even Fiona could not have faulted me.

“I’m so sorry, Drych. So sorry,” I whispered when I had done. Then I lay my nerveless hand on the boy and rolled him to his back . . . and found him still breathing. Shallow. Painful. His dark eyes were open, begging life not to desert him here on the brink of the abyss

“Gods of earth and sky! Stubborn . . . to hold on while I sing you into the afterlife.”

With the slightest movement of his lips and the slightest bit of apprehension in his face, Drych whispered a profound question. “Master?”

“I’m here, Drych,” I said, trying to smile with lips that were numb. “Indeed I am. And if you can hold on a bit more, then so can I. Here . . .” I laid his flaccid arm about my shoulders and considered the immense problem of getting to my feet. I fumbled for the dropped spear, still stained with my own blood, and transformed it into a wooden post. Using it for leverage, I eased upward, hoping the rent muscles in my back would hold together long enough to get the boy up.

“You must call the Aife,” I gasped, heaving him to his feet, both of us swaying dangerously. “I can’t do it. Tell her . . . just say, ‘Aife,
gyat
.’ She’ll understand it.”
Gyat
meant “get the portal as close to me as you can possibly make it.” Ysanne and I had made up our own language for hard times.

Drych managed to get out the words before he slipped into insensibility. But he wasn’t dead when the portal appeared . . . not quite. “Go safely,” I said after dragging him the few steps to the opening. “Heal well. Live.” I shoved him gently through the wavering doorway, then fell to my knees, fighting for a last breath as the world and I dissolved together.

Once an Aife’s portal is closed down, the possessed victim does not retain the wounds his demon suffered in the demon combat. The spear hole in my back, the sword wound between my ribs, and the other results of my night of combat were gone when I came to awareness on a morning that was gray and still. I was, however, exhausted to the point of desperation. And as before, my head felt exactly as one might expect—as though a war had been fought within its bony confines. My bandaged eye throbbed, and my shriveled heart grieved for what had happened and what was to come. My wife was going to kill me. And there was nothing I could do about it.

Ezzarians were cowards when it came to meting out judgments on their own. While finding it easy to say “live” or “die” or “go mad” to those demon victims we sought out in the world, we had a difficult time in condemning ourselves to necessary death. The children like my son, born possessed, were laid out naked in the forest near the haunts of wolves. If the gods meant for them to live, we said, they would live. But the gods had created wolves to devour such tasty morsels of flesh, and when we found the tiny, red-stained bones, we claimed it was the gods who killed our children, not us. A possessed Warden was another such dilemma. If he could not be healed, then what was the Queen to do? He could not be allowed to live, for he carried secrets that could endanger our existence. He was a powerful sorcerer and a powerful fighter who could afflict other humans with his demon madness. He, too, had to die, but what Ezzarian, sworn to protect life, could wield the ax or rope to do it?

And so another way had been devised. Immobilize the abomination with spells and potions and bindings, lay him out well guarded so that no one could come to his rescue, and cut him. Not the large veins that would surely kill him quickly, but in other places—arms or legs or back—or perhaps put a knife in the belly. If the gods wished him to live, he would live. But the gods had meant a man to have blood in him, and so when the man’s heart had nothing more to pump, it was the gods who had executed him, not us.

Drych was not dead. But neither was he conscious, able to give some small evidence that perhaps I had not slain two young Wardens and one very old one, as well as the young Ezzarian stranger. The demon fire still burned blue in my unbandaged eye, and that was evidence enough.

I lay on my belly, my arms and legs spread out and tied to stakes driven very firmly into the ground. They had built a circle of small fires around me and thrown enough jasnyr in each one to stuff a pillow. The smoke hung thick and choking, making my nerves thrum painfully with demon memories. The air was heavy. Oppressive. Still. A storm was coming.

“Will you not allow him to tell his story, my lady?” said Kenehyr. “To bleed a man without defense . . .” The white-haired Comforter sat leaning against one of the pillars a few paces away from me.

“Three Wardens and one youth lie dead,” spat Talar. “In Nevya’s tent another victim lies lost in hopeless madness, no doubt afflicted by this same demon. This Warden’s soul is destroyed. What more evidence is needed?”

My bandaged eye blocked any glimpse of those who stood over me. Ysanne, Fiona, Maire, Talar, and Caddoc were unbodied voices. Waves of helpless rage washed through me as they spoke across my back as if I were already dead.

As always, Caddoc added his voice to Talar’s. “We have seen his corruption and his villainy. Fiona says our barrier has held firm, and the gateway has disappeared with the dawn. We need to be done here and get home before these possessed Derzhi pounce. Who knows what this devil has told them? Who knows what will happen with the demons now?”

Lightning ripped the blackening sky behind the pillar, and a muted rumble lagged only briefly. Not far. The storms in this wild land were ferocious. My skin was clammy with the stifling stillness, and the vessels in my head throbbed with warning. I tried again to move. If I could only uproot one of the stakes to get a hand or foot free . . . but either their spells and potions were too potent or I had reached the end of my strength.

“But Emrys claims that Seyonne did not slay him or Tegyr when he had the chance,” said Kenehyr. “Does that not seem strange?”

“It was clear that this demon held a grudge against poor Merryt and wanted to save his power to crush the older man.” Maire. Even the Weaver had been deceived by the old Ezzarian. “Tegyr now lies dead, and Emrys admits he was confused.”

“But Fiona’s reports of Seyonne’s ideas . . . What if . . . ? I think we should wait for Drych to waken.”

“These reports are but evidence of madness and corruption,” said Talar. “And Catrin says it could be weeks before we even know if the boy will survive.”

Kenehyr would not leave it. “Fiona, tell us again. Why did Seyonne go to the demons? What is this madness about splitting ourselves apart?”

“It makes no difference,” said my watchdog fiercely. “The Queen has decided.” I recognized that tone of voice, and I pitied whoever had to deal with Fiona in the next hours. Nothing was going to please her.

“But—”

If I could have spoken, I would have begged Kenehyr to stop. The dear old man was going to get himself into trouble, and indeed, there was nothing to be done. Vyx had not come. The demons had not yet slaughtered the Ezzarians, but if they had not been allowed through the gateway, it was going to happen soon. And if they had gotten through . . . Merryt was dead, but there were others like Gennod. If Vyx had not secured the fortress, then I had unleashed the darkness. Blaise lay in madness, and his time had likely run out. I could not determine the hour, but I was not going to make my rendezvous with Aleksander.
What comes, comes. Let it be done with. Let the storm break.

Caddoc forced himself calm. “My lady, we should be on our way home. Our spies tell of these dreadful disturbances in the Derzhi camps all night . . . just as this one threatened. The warriors are in frenzy.”

“Enough,” said Ysanne, her voice like ice. “All of you, leave me alone here.”

“But, my—”

“Leave me or I’ll have you spread out with him, Caddoc.”

The others withdrew. For a while, all I glimpsed was the tail of Ysanne’s green gown swirling in agitation. She was angry. When she was troubled, she sat still; when she was angry, she paced. At last she came to kneel beside me, so close I could smell her hair and the sweetness of her skin.

I could neither move nor speak. Their potions and enchantments had seen to that. But with every shred of my being, I begged time to run backward and Ysanne to hear all I wanted to tell her of love and memory and desire.
Let me take you in my arms once more, beloved, and let me brush my hands over the swelling form of our son. Let me whisper to you again of the joy we know and the joy to come when our love takes life. You are my heart, my peace, the breath of my being. Make me forget everything that’s come between us, my love. Help me forget.
My tongue held the words shaped by my longing, but there they died unspoken. My cheek was pressed against the hard ground, my good eye half-closed. A few cold spatters tickled my face. Rain. Not Ysanne’s tears. When she spoke at last, it was not with regret or longing.

“Damn you, Seyonne! Damn you. I thought you loved me. I betrayed my oath for you—letting the demon child live. I was ready to come with you as soon as Fiona was prepared. I would have given up everything for you, but you wouldn’t wait. You, in your infernal stubbornness and pride . . . you wouldn’t trust me. Then you went and destroyed yourself and left me nothing. You get to die, but I’ll have to see you this way forever and know what I did. What love is that?”

I heard the slip of a knife pulled from a sheath, and at the same time, something dropped to the dirt in front of my eye. Small, round . . . gleaming dully in the storm-laden air . . . ah, gods of night . . . the token I had given her on our wedding day: a gold ring, delicate, graven with roses and wrapped with enchantments of protection and loving memory. I was staring so intently at the abandoned ring that I didn’t even notice the movement of her hand, only the ripping fire when she buried the knife deep in my right side.

She stood up and spoke to someone who approached her from behind me. “Let no one succor him. Send word when he’s dead.” And as the storm broke, lashing the hills of Dasiet Homol with bitter rain, she walked away.

 

It was a long day dying. The cold rain that battered my bare back pooled beneath me, and a constant warm tide leaked into it from the dull ache in my side. Thunder and lightning rampaged across the hillsides; soft hail tried to hammer me into the ground and had the two guards softly cursing. I supposed they kept so quiet because they were afraid the demon might invade them once my physical existence was done with. I, the demon.

I did not close my unbandaged eye. I could not bear to be alone in darkness with my thoughts, with Denas, whose voice was mercifully silent, though I felt his anger raging deep within like a subterranean river. Better to keep focused on some dull object: the smooth white roundness of a pillar, the ant struggling to get around a melting hailstone, the dirt clod dissolving into the wet ground
. Fill your senses with the ordinariness of it—its color and shape and texture and smell—and soon there will be no room for other, more uncomfortable sensations
. Galadon had taught me the technique so a healer could stitch my wounds without giving me any pain-dulling medicament. A Warden could not afford to drink such potions. Too much of them left a man muddled in the head. And now when I would have given much to be so muddled, the Ezzarians had filled me with this useless mess that kept me paralyzed and powerless, but left every pain of body and mind excruciatingly vivid. Bad enough to be required to lie in the cold rain dying. One shouldn’t have to think about it.