Depths of Madness (36 page)

Three, four, five.

She panted, trying not to think about the burning in her arms.

Six, seven, eight.

Gods, so tired. Almost there.

Nine, ten—

There was a crack, her hand slipped, and Twilight’s heart stopped.

She caught herself, fingers of her left hand holding her aloft in the frieze. Her shadow flicked its gaze to her, but it could do nothing. It was just a shadow, after all, and had no body.

Twilight looked at the handhold she had fumbled. The rock had cracked and slid away, leaving nothing to grab. The other edge of the floor lay not more than a pace away, but she couldn’t swing past it from where she hung.

Her arm was growing weary—at least it wasn’t the half-broken one—and she couldn’t quite touch the previous handhold. This was the smoothest part of the stone, and she couldn’t see any other spots nearby to clutch. She wasn’t sure her right arm could support her, even if she could have reached.

Could she have come so far, only to fail now?

Doubt closed around Twilight. What was she doing? She was here to attack a demon priest who couldn’t help but know she was coming, and who would surely slay her with his superior powers. Where was necessity—her beloved pragmatism?

She had led so many to misery—companions like Taslin and Gargan, innocents like Slip and Asson, even villains like Davoren. By which of Beshaba’s cruel whims was it that Twilight lived, when they did not?

It would be so simple to let go. What did she have left to hold onto? Everything she had ever loved had deserted or betrayed her. What seemed years of brutish darkness had hammered

her already-jaded spirit into real despair.

Liet, Twilight thought, and resolve returned.

She started to swing back and forth, pumping her legs. As a child on a rope swing builds momentum, so did Twilight move, agonizingly slowly. Her arm screamed in protest, but she gritted her teeth and pushed the pain from her mind.

As she swung back and forth, visions came to her, reasons not to give up. She felt again the peace of the goliath village, saw the passionate Taslin leaping into the worm’s jaws to avenge her beloved, and she basked again in Slip’s ceaseless smile.

Images from deeper in her past returned. She saw the men and women she had loved and watched die—saw their living faces rather than their skulls. She saw Neveren sacrificing himself for her, and watched Nymlin’s eyes as he plunged to his death for her. Memories from the near past. She saw Gestal’s mocking grin and heard the way he laughed at her murdered companions. She felt Liet’s loving gaze and remembered the way he leaped into danger to save her.

She saw her own face then, but the eyes were not hers. Those eyes she had glimpsed only in dreams—those of her lord, the being she had just met and had known all along. The face she saw was both the beings she served—herself and Erevan— though only one of those two served her in return.

Twilight realized, then, that she had something to hold. She had so much more.

She swung and swung, building up speed back and forth until…

The force became too much for her arm and she pushed off.

A weightless heartbeat later, she slammed into the stone, her legs jarred as though by a lightning strike. Twilight suppressed a gasp of pain and toppled—forward, not backward, she made certain—onto the ledge.

There she lay, stunned, blood seeping from her mouth. Her legs hadn’t liked the landing, but her tender ribs had hated it, and she spent entirely too many breaths wheezing on the stone.

Get up, you mad wench, she told herself. Get. Up.

She did.

She knelt before a painted archway, and her senses picked up the passage of heat through the stone. Gestal’s door. A door for her to…

Scout first.

With a gesture, Twilight sent her shadow slipping into the archway. It needed no words—only the flicker of the elf s will— to know it was to search and return in the span of five breaths. Meanwhile, she recovered Betrayal, her boots, and glove. No sense facing Gestal unprepared.

Twilight waited ten breaths for the shadow to return, but it did not. She sneaked forward, as quietly as she could move.

It turned out to be unnecessary. As if by command, the door ground open before her, and she looked in upon a chamber of cut stone lit by roiling flames. She let her eyes shift out of darksight and into her own keen vision. In the center of the chapel burned twin charnel pits—the throats of Demogorgan, she realized—from which rose flickering orange and red flames like dancing fiends. Beside them was a tilted copper basin with something like water trickling from its edge.

It was certainly a trap, but that didn’t matter. Twilight had come this far; she couldn’t stop now. She stalked in slowly, keeping to the dancing shadows that flickered against the walls.

The chapel was marred with perversity. Symbols and scenes of violence and depravity plastered the smooth walls, drawn with blood and offal. Bloody bones and discarded bits of flesh, as left from a meal, lay scattered about the place, and skins of varying shades of gray—Twilight did not want to think about their origin—hung from the ceiling. The place reeked of decay, corruption, and rot.

At her feet, Twilight found several hunks of flesh she guessed had come from fiendish lizards. There were also broken stingers as of abeil, black and gray scalps that could only be grimlock in origin, and heads, some of which Twilight could barely identify, and some she almost recognized before she looked away, sickened.

A shadow moved toward her, and Twilight almost drew Betrayal before she realized it was her own. “Where—?” she

began. Then her shadow fled into her. She felt a deathly chill embrace her for just a heattbeat before it was part of her again, trailing from her feet instead of dancing freely.

A cloaked head rose from the rubbish and skins hanging about the room. “Well met, lover,” Gestal said. His cowled eyes reflected the flames, and the snake tattoo smoldered on his demonfleshed cheek.

“Liet,” Twilight whispered. Her hand eased, slowly, toward the hilt of her rapier.

“One of us,” the demon priest said in a bemused tone.

Twilight did not respond, only extended her sword and took a step forward.

Demonic magic flared and the steel became white-hot. Twilight took three steps forward, gritting her teeth against the pain. The agony multiplied with every step, and the eldritch steel burst into flame until she could no longer hold it. With a cry, she let Betrayal clatter to the ground. Twilight pulled her hand back, wincing.

Her left hand brought up the crossbow and she grasped it in both hands to steady her aim. The quarrel streaked out and struck Gestal in the shoulder. He looked down at it, idly, and finished his second spell. Shadow blasted the crossbow from her fingers.

Now Twilight drew Davoren’s stiletto, palming it under her arm as before, but Gestal finished his third spell. Every inch of her flesh ignited with abyssal pain. The thin knife clattered from her nerveless fingers, and Twilight staggered to a halt. It wasn’t the binding magic, this time—Gestal wasn’t so kind. Phantom pain wracked her. Her bones shivered, tearing at the inside of her flesh, and she gasped and sobbed despite herself.

With a cry, she fell to her knees, eyes staring down helplessly at her fallen sword. The flames had burned away the last of the gray film over its steel. It was a white sword now, for all the good it did her. She would not have the strength to lift it.

“To come against me alone, wounded, weak…” The demon priest grinned. Light and flame roiled in his eyes, which darted back and forth wildly. “I had thought more highly of you.” He gestured upward. “Stand.”

His voice carried the same compulsion Davoren had used to slay Asson, except with many times the power. Twilight’s body jerked upright, grinding her broken bones, and she could not move. Tears trickled down her cheeks and she grit her teeth. Twilight found that her voice worked, with great effort.

“You’d have… killed me anyway,” she managed. She marshaled her strength of will, and attempted to slide around his enchantment, as she had before.

“How fatalistic. How like you,” he said. “And have no fear—your mind won’t slip out of this enchantment.”

Even as he said it, Twilight felt hope fading as the spell bound her mind with greater force—strength that was supple and flexible, with the adaptability of the mad. “Come… closer…” she said. “I… have something… to say…”

The priest took a step closer, and Twilight lashed out, clawing for his eyes.

And fell short.

Her cracked nails snapped within a thumb’s breadth of his nose. Her hands twisted into claws, and Twilight strained, her teeth clenched, and veins stood out on her temples and forehead. If she could only break his will, she could free herself of his magic and gouge out his distorted features. She scratched desperately, praying, but she couldn’t reach that wide stare.

Gestal hissed a single laugh. “You amuse me.”

She let the hands fall. “I amuse you, you disgust me,” she said, somehow finding the strength for a quip. “A fair trade, I suppose.”

Gestal smiled—a sickening expression, because it lit flames in her heart even as it made her want to retch—which she could not do.

“I have an offer to make you.” “No,” Twilight said.

“You have the choice, moonflower,” he said. “The choice that is offered only to those strong enough to seize destiny in their teeth and wrestle it bleeding to the ground.”

“Like you?”

Gestal’s snarl was more like that of a hyena than of a man.

“Like my master,” he corrected. “And those who serve him well.” He stepped away from her and spread his arms wide, indicating the walls with their old bloodstains and perverse murals as though they were something grand.

“What choice?” Twilight asked. She could work through this enchantment, given time. Just keep him talking, just keep concentrating…

“I have controlled these depths for many years, seeking and searching for a companion—a powerful swordswoman, or a sorceress, perhaps, to serve my master. For the glory of Demogorgon. And now, I have found one.”

Twilight blinked and her concentration went away. Her body jerked itself erect again and she stared. “What?”

“Join us,” Gestal said.

Hope fled Twilight along with her will, fighting the spell. So that was his play—she had thought it merely part of her dream, to lure her to death and madness. But she saw now.

And she was tempted.

“My prince is the storm and the fury, Twilight of the Fox, the bloodstained hurricane,” the demonist said in his emotionless, calm voice. “Demogorgon offers power beyond imagining, strength of sinew and will to control and ruin.” He held out his scarred arms. “Stand at my side—serve him with me. With us.”

A thought occurred to her, along with the will to pit her mind against the spell once more. Not for the first time, she thanked the gods for her wit.

“You run this bedlam…” Twilight managed. “Just to find… love?” She forced a smile. “That’s pathetic, or just sick.”

Gestal shrugged. “Some search taverns, some festhalls,” he said. “Some wander for gold and prestige to impress lovers. Some go to war for love, some shatter decades of peace for love.” He lowered her hands. “Do any of these make more sense?”

“Correction,” Twilight said. “That’s pathetic and sick.”

He looked at her hard where she stood, back arched.

“We are beyond your lies,” he said. “Erevan Ilesere, prankster of the decadent Seldarine, is your scapegoat—the name upon which you blame all of your pain. 1 shall not begrudge you this,

but it is a false path you walk. And what does it bring you?” He shrugged. “Suffering. Blindness. Emptiness masked by brief illusions like joy and purpose in a world without them. Your way of avoiding the inevitable—the truth.” “Purpose,” the elf repeated.

“A delusion,” said Gestal. “Desire, will, and consequence— these are the only truths. You must choose. You hide from this, and that is weakness.”

“Weakness is in my heart.” Just a little more. She could feel the magic eroding.

“What is the heart?” Gestal asked. “A muscle—a muscle that tastes just like rothe1 meat.” He appeared to take Twilight’s nauseated silence as an avowal. “It feels nothing but the blade that parts it.”

“You are wrong. I don’t run—I have chosen.”

“Perhaps,” Gestal said, inclining his head to that irrelevance. “But he—Erevan—is the wrong choice. You seek a way to define yourself, and he is not it. He is an illusion. Whether he exists or not, he is nothing but illusion to you. A lie. A deceit. You, only.”

Like Liet, she realized.

“Who is real?” Twilight snuffled blood back into her nose. “Liet… or you?”

Gestal looked taken aback. “Why both,” he said, “but I was the first. Liet is but a lost, love-lorn boy—a pathetic child.”

No, Twilight thought. He’s more than that.

“Are there others?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure why.

Gestal furrowed his brow, as if searching his mind. “No,” he said. “None of consequence—merely me, and my tool, Liet. I am his strength, and he is my weakness.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

Gestal grinned—hideously. “And yours.” His skin swam and ran like butter slopping over a pail, and Liet stood before Twilight once more—Liet with Gestal’s bastard eyes. “You choose devotion to a lie over your lover?”

Twilight realized he was mistaken. Firstly, Gestal was wrong—or rather, he was right, but he had just slipped and

given her the truth. Secondly, his power was failing. The spell was fading, slipping from her mind. Twilight might have smiled.

“What do you choose?”

Twilight did smile. “I choose myself,” she said.

Then the demonflesh flowed back. Gestal looked at her for a long time, his breathing increasing in rapidity until he panted, then dissolved into mirth. “You choose death, then?” he asked lightly. “Very well. All is desire, will, and consequence, as I say. And there are consequences for denying our desires.” His hand came up, glowing black.

“One plea,” Twilight said tightly.

That putrid grin returned. He pointed at the yawning pits— two holes in the stone, from which flames arose. “You want to go into the pits, instead?” He sighed. The blackness died around his hand. “I shall enjoy watching the climax of your fall, as I have watched its course these last days.”