Revelation (44 page)

Once out of earshot, Merryt breathed slightly easier, though our moment’s proximity had revealed such quivering under his skin as could not be easily quieted. “Vallyne’s sentinels,” he said. “The lady and I don’t get along, as I’ve said.” He led me down a winding stair and into a narrow, bitterly cold tunnel.

At the far southern boundaries of Ezzaria were bottomlands, where the meandering streams that kept our land green and fertile came together and grew sluggish and slow as they approached the wide Samonka River that watered the jungles of Thrid. As a youth I had hunted in the Samonka swamps, training, of course, learning to endure the hot, humid climate, where the air was so clouded with insects, you had to wear cloth over mouth and nose as the Derzhi did in desert sandstorms. In some places the Samonka mud was chest high, so thick it sucked at your limbs as you fought to move. Every step through the downward tunnel under Denas’s castle was a similar struggle. My limbs were lead. My muscles failed me. Vallyne’s proscription blazed in my head like a fire in the forest, choking every other sense, threatening to destroy the flimsy structures of life I had rebuilt in my head. I was not just violating her command, but her trust . . . the bridge our strange relationship had built between her kind and my own. I could not bear the thought of it, and my reluctance seemed to take on physical shape in my incapable body. “Merryt . . . I can’t do this.”

“We’re almost there.” Merryt shot a quick glance over his shoulder as we passed by the dark opening to a side passage and arrived at a low-arched opening barred by a gate of rusty iron. The Ezzarian pushed on the gate, and it swung slowly away from him, creaking loudly. Beyond the arched gap lay a vast darkness . . . revealed by the smell of sour mud and old stone and beast venom as the demons’ practice arena. “You’ve come for truth, remember? We’ve just got to cross the field and sneak through the gate on the other side, and we’ll come to the feasting rooms. We’ll have ourselves a fine place to watch.”

I stopped and bent over, leaning my hands on my knees and gasping for breath, unable to take another step forward as my mind forced my body’s revolt. What was wrong with me? Never had I faced such complete physical incapacity from my mind’s forbidding. “Thank you for trying to help, but I can’t. She trusts me. I’ve got to go back.”

“Afraid, are you? Can’t bear to remember these are rai-kirah that you’re sworn to oppose? You’ll know it when you see what they’re about. Let me tell you a bit . . .” He stuck his broad face close to mine, telling his grotesque tale with an unseemly eagerness.

Early in his captivity, Merryt had sneaked into the demons’ feasting trying to learn of it. What he had come upon was a scene of horror—living visions of depravity. “All the worst things we’ve seen possessed souls do in our world . . . the demons gorge themselves with the taste and feel and sound and smell of them,” he said, near spitting in disgust to tell the tale. “They live the deeds over and over again, and the experience of it puts them in a frenzy of fighting and mating and gorging themselves with food and drink, until they fall upon the floor to sleep.” He sneered at me. “I suppose you’re afraid to see it.”

My reason told me I should go with him, but neither his challenge nor my own could mute my body’s overwhelming surety that it would be a dreadful mistake. I shook my head and turned back . . . and believed the action saved my life.

Three demons stood behind me, arms raised. Yelling at Merryt to duck, I slammed away a heavy cudgel just as it began to fall toward my head, then I dropped to the ground, kicking a demon’s hand as he let fly a dagger. The weapon clattered to the stone, wide of any harmful mark. The passage was too narrow. We were outnumbered and could scarcely see, and I had no idea what kind of battle we might face. So I rolled backward toward the gate and bounced to my feet in the darkness just beyond it, flattening my back against a wall just inside the archway. Merryt was right beside me, cursing with a dedicated fervor I’d not heard since living with the Derzhi.

“There’s at least three of them,” I whispered. “And perhaps one more.”

My surmise was correct. A wooden club whacked into the wooden beam above my head. The wall behind our backs was the support for the viewing stands, so the attacker was just above and behind our heads. I dodged a second blow, then reached up and grabbed the arm that had thrown it, pulling the attached body over my head and slamming it to the ground so hard I heard the bones break. A wad of leather strapping fell from the viewing stand on top of the sturdy red-bearded body, so he looked like a fat fly caught in a spider web.

“You take the first one that comes out of the passage,” I said, “and I’ll take the next.”

Merryt hesitated for so long that I thought I was going to have to go after all of the attackers myself. Burly shoulders emerged cautiously from the archway, as did a booming voice. “Have you secured him? Our master says to—” With a bellowing curse, Merryt launched himself at the searching demon.

The two others ran out on the big one’s heels, and I snatched up the fallen demon’s club and spun, letting all my strength flow through the arm-length weapon. The first demon was stopped instantly when the club smashed into his chest—stopping his wind if not his heart. A quarterstaff dropped from his hand. Having put everything into the blow, I had to duck and roll to give myself a chance to recover and see where the other fellow had gone. As I passed by the toppling figure, I grabbed his staff. A good thing, for just as I rolled to my back, a bludgeon came whistling through the murk, aimed at my head. With the fallen rai-kirah’s staff, I held off the blow long enough to get to my feet, and in a blurring motion his bludgeon transformed into a quarterstaff of his own.

The demon was a fine fighter and untiring, easier to manage when you were half again as tall as a man, had scale like armor on your torso, and had three right arms. He kept shouting to his comrades to come after me, but two were flat on the ground and Merryt was occupying the fourth somewhere off in the dark. I was rusty—practicing moves in one’s head until the body learned them was a skill Wardens were taught, but was no substitute for true weapons training. I had not lifted a sword or staff in months. As I circled and attacked, straining to see in the dim light, hoping strategy and experience would wear down my opponent before he assessed my limits, I felt a sudden sickening lurch in the depths of my being, an explosive wrench of power, soon followed by a second and a third. Reeling from the waves of darkness that flooded my soul, I stepped back, only to see my opponent scream in fury. “What do you think you’re—”

But he never finished it. He fell to the ground with an ax buried in his thick neck. Before I could gather my thoughts, Merryt was on top of him, holding aloft a palm-sized oval of glass that gleamed softly in the darkness. The pulsing shape of light trying feebly to crawl away from the dead body was stopped instantly. Paralyzed. And before I could cry out in protest, Merryt plunged a silver knife into the demon form.

“What are you doing?” I said, horror-struck. Nauseated. “You’ve destroyed them!” Not just the bodies that could always be remade, but the rai-kirah themselves.

“I’ve no patience for Ezzarian rules anymore.” Merryt stood up and wiped the Warden’s knife on his victim’s clothes. “I’ve seen too much. Lived too long.” He dropped the knife and the mirror into a small leather bag, and he gripped my arm. “I couldn’t let them kill the only other human in this place. Now we’d best be away from here. Whoever it is hired them will be hunting.”

I looked over my shoulder as he dragged me back through the passage, watching the corpses slowly fade and vanish, one by one. The physical bodies were nothing but enchantments. The demons were already dead. No one would ever know exactly what had happened. Only the one who had sent the attackers would even suspect that we’d had a hand in it.

We returned to my room, and Merryt took a hasty leave. “My apologies, Exile. I’d no meaning to lead you into such danger. I thought that way was safe.” He paused in the doorway. “Did you recognize the brutes?”

I shook my head. I was numb. Shaken. “Thank you for saving my life. Now I owe you twice over.” How could I tell him how I detested what he’d done? Or how foolish it had been to kill our attackers without discovering who they were?

But evidently Merryt recognized them. “A dirty business in a dirty place. I’d best be off. Watch your back—those were Denas’s Gastai.” He slapped my shoulder and disappeared into the gloom.

The horror of the demon deaths took a long while to dismiss. The lingering images of the fading bodies made it worse. Like the one in the viewing stand, each of the attackers had carried a coil of leather strapping—exactly the kind used to bind me when I was in the pits. Merryt had believed he was saving my life . . . but I didn’t think so. The attackers weren’t trying to kill me. Denas planned to send me back to captivity—worse than killing, one might claim . . . unless you were a demon, whose death was so starkly empty. No body to burn or bury. No family to mourn or remember. To fade away so that no one could even see where you fell or how you met your end. And what came after death for a being of light?

I pulled the blankets over my head and dived into guilty sleep. I dreamed of Ham-fist and woke up screaming.

 

 

 

After my deadly excursion with Merryt—an incident that might never have occurred, for all I heard of it—I could scarcely force myself to leave my room. What if someone had seen us in the tunnels or at the courtyard or in the practice arena? What if there had been a fifth attacker who had witnessed the fight? What if Denas saw my guilt-scribed face and made the connection with his missing Gastai? What if he tried it again? Yet when Vallyne summoned me, I could find no excuse to stay in. If I pleaded illness, she might detect my lie.

Two days after the ill-omened adventure, the lady invited me to walk with her in a long gallery where the walls were painted with stripes and swirls of every color. At first I thought the place only a failed venture into art, useful for nothing but making one dizzy. But Vallyne taught me to relax my eyes and let myself fall into it, allowing the colors to surround and enfold me like a painted ocean. The experience was gloriously pleasing, as if the colors—so weak in the rest of Rudai shaping—had taken on a life and energy of their own, very different from their role in the world I knew. As we stopped to enjoy a section of deep blues and purples, someone came hurrying out of the shadows and almost knocked the lady over. Merryt. He stopped just in time.

“Gryallak!”
hissed Vallyne. The word was a demon curse of great ugliness that had no corresponding word in any language I knew. It meant something like “your vile person makes me want to chew up your essence and spit it out, and if someone else doesn’t do it soon, I will.” She made a small twisting gesture with her hand. “You trespass where you are forbidden, ylad. You will pay the price of it.”

Merryt blanched and backed away. Before he could run, three Rudai guards appeared behind him. He wrenched his arms away and twisted his body fiercely, but to no avail, and he ended up facedown upon the floor, cursing. One of the demons stepped deliberately on the Ezzarian’s outflung hands. “We should take the rest of these,” said the Rudai, grinding his boots on Merryt’s remaining fingers. “Make sure he’s up to no more of his evil ways.”

“Wait! Don’t . . .” With this paltry protest I moved forward, hoping to stop it, but Vallyne touched my arm, halting my steps. One of the Rudai ripped a leather pouch from Merryt’s belt, peered inside, and gave it to the lady. While guards dragged the protesting Ezzarian away, Vallyne pulled two objects from the bag: a silver Warden’s knife and a Luthen mirror.

My face was scalding. While holding me motionless with her cool gaze, Vallyne handed them back to the Rudai and gave him his orders. “Show these to the ylad Merryt’s friends and then destroy the wicked things. And see him punished appropriately.”

Vallyne began to stroll along the gallery again, in a direction opposite to the way they had taken Merryt. I remained where I was, looking stupidly one way and then the other. Vallyne returned, took my arm, and pulled me with her. “He has been warned, Exile. He knows what it is he risks when he comes this way, carrying such foul implements.” Vallyne’s passionate hatred for the big Ezzarian was unlike anything I had felt from her.

The next time I glimpsed Merryt—limping through a crowded passageway—his broad face was one large bruise. Vallyne would say nothing more of him, but only reminded me of her command. In guilty confusion, I stayed away from him.

 

Indeed, I never again ventured outside the bounds Vallyne set for me. I took no risks, asked few questions, sought no information. Cowardice was not the only reason I abandoned my purpose. Though I pompously pronounced to myself that I was observing demon life so as to learn of it, in truth my every waking thought was of Vallyne.

For a while I told myself that I was bewitched and tried to hold onto some semblance of reason when I was with her. But as the water clock was refilled again and again, I lost my remaining sense. I buried my fears in her laughter, allowed her beauty and wit to answer my every question, abandoned the search for my own mind in the delights of hers. My desire for her grew like mushrooms in the dark, and no amount of frenzied training exercises could distract me from it. Whether asleep or awake I dreamed of loving her. I told myself that her body was incapable of human sensations. Demons never touched one another, even when they danced. Their senses were broken and confused. She could not judge the taste of wine; she balked at food that I thought fine and relished other that made me ill. And so, though I longed to teach her enchanted body the truth of human passion, my touch could as likely give her pain as pleasure, and the thought left me half crazed. In the dismal light of my cluttered room, I would huddle in my empty bed, sick with desire and loneliness. Never did Vallyne mention my kiss or my quite obvious obsession with her. Nor did she change her own nature, which was to tease and taunt and torment even as she tried to soothe my mental miseries with distraction and kindness. Never did she ask me to yield my name, though the secret hung between us like a dark blot upon the sun.