Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3) (63 page)

Doors opened and closed. Feet went this way and that.

Human sounds faded away, leaving only the night animals to disturb the quiet. Kolan shrugged a little, dismissing his unease, and walked on.

A ripple of sound, more sensed than audible, stopped him three steps later: a tortured, dying scream. Not nearby—well to the northwest of him—but it carried that peculiar, despairing resonance that only came from one kind of death.

Kolan stood, fixed in place as surely as though he’d been chained again. His first thought was of Ellemoa—but that was foolish, she wasn’t here, she couldn’t be—

But that had been a death caused by a ha’ra’ha feeding. Which meant there was another one moving about here, in spite of the barrier laid down across the Forest border.

Good gods, how many of them
are
there?

It occurred to him that Arason had once hosted an entire community of ha’ra’hain; and suddenly he felt much less certain in his plan to seek sanctuary there. If
sionno
Hagair had really understood what the creatures could do, Kolan had a feeling he would have been considerably less tolerant of their presence and more sympathetic with Captain Kullag.

“But we never killed any humans,” someone said from the dark shadows of a stone pine to his right. “We took what we needed from the Lake, and left your kind alone.”

Kolan’s heart thudded into a rapid, shocked rhythm; he spun to face the voice, his lips already, silently, forming an impossible name.

“Rosin taught me to hurt the humans,” she said, emerging from black shadow into the dim starlight. “Rosin taught me to enjoy the pain I caused.”

She went sideways, circling him like a stalking cat examining its prey. He stood still, eyes shut, too stunned and breathless to even speak.

“I thought I killed you,” she said from somewhere behind him.

“Not quite,” he answered, dry as old bones, then broke into a laugh, unable to help himself. He turned to face her, heedless of danger. “I thought they’d killed
you.
Gods—Ellemoa!” He put out a hand; withdrew it quickly as she startled back.

They stared at one another in mutual wonder. Slowly, she advanced a step, another: paused, one hand at her mouth, worrying at her lower lip. A sudden cascade of aches wracked across his body, as though every old wound she’d caused was flaring to life, reminding him of what he faced.

Flames tracing along his arms; her eyes gleaming gold and red in unholy reflection, laughing as he screamed....

She backed up another step as he yelped in reawakened agony. He caught himself to silence, clenching his jaw to keep the whimper contained, and waited until the aches faded somewhat.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said then. “It’s over. It’s over. And Rosin’s dead.
Teyhataerth
is dead. They can’t force you into that any longer—”

She laughed, straightening into more assurance, and said, “You and my son! You both think I should go by
human
standards of behavior.”

“Your—He’s alive!” A grin stretched Kolan’s face wide. “That’s
wonderful!”

“No,” she said flatly. “He’s a coward and a disappointment.”

Joy faded. He stared at her, unable to believe her cold demeanor. “Ellemoa,” he said, despairing. “He’s your
son.”

“And he thinks like a human.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” he said softly. “Is it, truly? We’re not all like Rosin, Ellemoa.”

“No?” she shot back. “You were just thinking that your precious Head of Church should have exterminated the lake-born, not encouraged tolerance of us!”

Breath hissed between his teeth—but of course she’d be able to see his every thought, with or without him knowing about it.

“I was thinking about what
you
did to me,” he said, low and fierce. “Are all ha’ra’hain like you, Ellemoa? Or are you the Rosin Weatherweaver of your kind?”

She came forward two fast steps at that, and ghostly blue flames flickered along her fingers for a heartbeat, then went out. He held his ground, entirely unafraid all of a sudden; what more could she do under the open sky, after all, than she’d already done in the depths of the earth?

He deliberately brought the encounter with Fen to mind; she smiled a little, then retreated.

“You should have killed him,” she said. “You would have enjoyed it.”

“But I didn’t,” he said. “And I won’t kill for enjoyment, nor to save myself pain. That’s based in weakness, not strength, no matter what Rosin told you.”

“I don’t know why I never killed you,” she said, amusement vanishing into a sneer.

“You were never
told
to kill me,” he said. “And you took orders, didn’t you? Anything Rosin ordered, you jumped right into doing.”

“I didn’t have a
choice!”
she snapped. Starlight caught golden flecks from her eyes. “I was trying to survive!”

“What price survival?” he retorted.
“I
took the pain for refusing to do what
you
wanted.”

In a blurred leap, she stood right up against him, her eyes streaked with luminescent gold now; a bare finger’s breadth from actual physical contact, she paused: rigidly still, glaring like a maddened asp-jacau.

“Your refusal cost
me
pain,” she snarled. “Don’t you throw that in my face as though it makes you godly! You saw what he did to me—every time—”

“Yes,” he said, unflinching. “I saw. And I saw what
you
did to the humans he brought you afterwards. Didn’t it ever occur to you—Rosin set you at me
knowing
I’d refuse to follow your least wish,
planning
to punish you for my obstinacy, and then giving you victims to vent your rage and frustration on—in front of me, every time. Supposedly to teach me a lesson, wasn’t it? To make me obey your commands. Only it had nothing to do with
me.
It was all about bringing out the worst in
you.
Didn’t you
see
that? Didn’t you see what he was doing? You must have, by the end.”

Her eyelids slid over dimming gold in a slow, measured blink; when her eyes opened again they were a flat, whiteless black.

“Yes,” she said, low in the back of her throat. “I saw.”

She stepped back and turned away, then knelt on the ground, hands splayed out across the stone. He waited, watching the line of tension working through her back and shoulders; he’d seen her in enough versions of agony to know when staying very, very still was the only safe course.

At last she rose and turned to face him again, features composed and eyes human-normal.

“You’re a fool,” she said. “You ought to be trying to kill me.”

He laughed. “Why? So that you’ll be able to call killing me self-defense? No. I won’t make it that easy on you, Ellemoa. I’ve never raised a hand to stop you from hurting me, and I won’t now.”

“You swore you wouldn’t let anyone hurt you ever again,” she said. “Hypocrite! You’ll attack a helpless thief, but not someone who overmatches you.”

“I’ll defend myself,” he said, “but not against you. Never against you. That would make it too easy for you. I intend to keep your actions on your own conscience, not mine.”

“You think I have a conscience?” she said bitterly. “Again, you put me among the humans.”

“If you didn’t have a conscience,” he said, “you wouldn’t have sought out your son. You wouldn’t have simply walked away when he disappointed you.” Something in the way her head moved just then made him ask, sharply, “You didn’t kill your
son—?”

“No,” she said: a truth with a lie attached. He could feel it, even in just one word. “He’s alive.”

Kolan exhaled hard, debating whether to push for the details of the matter. Her head moved again, in slow negation. She wouldn’t answer. He shrugged, letting that go, and said instead, “You have a conscience. You could have killed me before I knew you were behind me, just now. You still could. But you’re—”

Once more the golden eyes glared into his, the heat of her body a bare hands-breadth away. “Don’t presume,” she said. “Don’t dare think you understand me. It’s not your place.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Kolan said, shifting tactical ground with the ease of long practice. Keep her off balance, keep her confused, keep her
intrigued:
that strategy had kept him alive so far.

“What
question?”

“Are all ha’ra’hain like you? Is this how you were taught to behave by your mother?”

A stretched, fragile moment of stillness followed that; then she was gone, silent as she’d come, ghosting off into the darkness.

“Ellemoa,” he said, not moving: he knew this game, too. But this time she didn’t have the constraint of stone walls bounding her movements. “Come back here and face me. Answer my question. Or are you afraid of the answer?”

“You’re deliberately provoking me,” she said, low and hoarse, from somewhere behind him. “Do you want me to kill you, Kolan?”

“I want you to come back and face me,” he said. “I want you to tell me the truth about yourself. Were you truly born to maim and kill? Is what Rosin taught you the way all ha’ra’hain aspire to behave? Is this the way you want your son to act—seeing humans as beneath you, as slaves and animals to slaughter and torture for your own enjoyment?” He paused, then dropped his volume to a scant murmur, knowing she’d hear it clearly: “Do you really
want
to treat humans the way Rosin treated
you?”

“You’ve said that before.”

“And more. Were you listening? Under Rosin’s control, fine—you were compelled. I’ve always understood that. That’s why I never fought back: there was no
point.
But those days are over. You don’t have that lash on your back any longer. It’s your
choice
to hand out pain, now; your
choice
to follow the path Rosin set before you.” He paused, then said, with carefully measured inflection, “Your choice to be
just like him.”

Silence. A long, dark silence; after a time, he began to wonder if she’d ghosted off completely, freed from the boundaries that had always forced her to return before.

“No,” she said from close by his right side, very quietly. “No, I’m still here.”

He put out his right hand palm up, slowly, without making any other move at all, even to turn his head; then waited. After another long, long stretch of listening to nothing but crickets and frogs, there came a faint scuffing sound, like a heel kicking lightly against stone.

“I can’t, Kolan,” she said, nearly a whisper. “I’m not—stable. Not sane. I’m still so
angry—
I so desperately want to pass the pain along.” She paused. “My son told me I should kill myself. Maybe he was right—”

Kolan sucked in a distressed breath.

“Oh, gods, Ellemoa,” he said, understanding her pain and her son’s point all at once. He bit his lip before he could blurt out something unwise.

“I was so angry,” she said. “So
hurt.
My own son... All I wanted was to protect him. To save him. And he... he can’t get past seeing me as a monster. He doesn’t want to understand.”

Kolan closed his eyes, steadying himself. “The Creeds tell us,” he said unemotionally, “that within every man is a monster and within every monster is a man; and that before we pick up our knives to attack one another we ought first to look within to excise our own evil.”

“You and your Creeds,” she said, wearily. “Don’t you ever stop reciting those washed-out pieties? What’s your own evil, then, Kolan? What’s
your
monster within?”

“You are, Ellemoa,” he said, a little surprised at his own ready admission of it.

“That’s nonsense,” she said, sharp and hostile. “I can’t be your inner monster. I’m out here, not inside you! Stop trying to confuse me.”

He smiled, his eyes still closed, and said, “No, you’re not inside me, Ellemoa. Not literally. I’m sorry; I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to confuse you.”

“What did you mean, then?” she demanded.

“I mean that in spite of everything you’ve done—to me, to others, to yourself—Ellemoa—” He opened his eyes and stretched his left hand out into the darkness, so that he stood with both arms outspread. “I still love you.”

She hissed and spat; he could almost feel her bristling with outrage. “Your stupid little human notions of love are meaningless to me!”

“Are they?” he said. “So it means nothing to you that I understand you completely—”

“You
don’t—”

“No?” He reached into memory for a trick she’d shown him long ago, before their shared captivity.

Pale orange flames flickered along his fingers for several heartbeats, then faded away.

She hissed briefly: he couldn’t tell if she were angry, amused, or startled. Then she said, in a burst of raw agony,
“Why?
If you’d only done that—even once—for me—to show Rosin that I wasn’t lying, that I could teach him—I tried so hard to give him the abilities he wanted. He called it
my
failure—just like my failure to give him a child—He wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t
listen—”

Kolan shuddered at the thought of Rosin Weatherweaver learning how to summon flame to his hand, or any of a dozen other tricks Ellemoa seemed to regard as trivial. Bright Bay wouldn’t be torn up; it would have been
leveled.

“You
listened. You learned. I gave you—so much—you don’t even know. Even now, you don’t really understand what I gave you, back then. You think your strength comes from your gods!”

Kolan sucked in a sharp breath, shaken by the implications of those words. She’d never spoken of that time, in the darkness; talking of moments spent under sunlight had been too painful for both of them. Before he could think of a response, she went on:

“But then—you ran away.” Her tone turned distant, hazed with recall. “You ran away from me for showing you what I could do—and that you could do it, too. That humans weren’t so very different from the lake-born.”

“No,” he said, seizing the chance to press his point, “we
aren’t
all that different, are we?”

She was silent.

“You’re a fool,” she said at last. “You truly are. I know what you’re trying to do, Kolan; but it isn’t going to work. I’m not that—that
foolish
any longer. I’m a monster; my son had it right, and I’m
slipping—”