The False Martyr (18 page)

Eia was his only hope. So
where was she? Tomorrow, he was supposed to be in Wildern. She had
promised to transport him, to protect him, so where had she gone?
After . . . after everything, how could she disappear without a
word? In his mind, he could still smell her, feel her hair tickling
his face, her warm body pressed to his. He shivered at the thought
and drank again from the bottle as tears wound their way down his
cheeks.

#

The world shook. Bottles
rattled in their racks. Dust fell from the ceiling.

In the darkness of the
cellar, in the cold, insulated from the outside by thick walls and
alcohol, that blast and the ones that followed barely penetrated
Ipid’s slumber. He stirred slowly. Another blast shook the cellar.
A bottle fell, shattered on the other side of the room. Ipid leapt
from the ground. He came down on his cut foot, stumbled, then
caught himself on the railing and struggled to remain standing as
the world spun.

Another blast was followed
by a scream, a long, harrowing scream that seemed only to build
until it was suddenly snuffed. “You dare to touch me!” a voice
shouted. There was another scream, higher pitched. It rose to
blood-curdling extremes before gurgling out. There was another
crash. A different man screamed. This one short and sudden. “Die!”
the voice ordered.

“
Eia,” Ipid breathed. It
had to be her, but he could not imagine those words, that harsh
voice coming from her. Eia’s voice was soft, lilting, teasing. This
was the voice of a demon, harsh and cruel, and Ipid suddenly
wondered if he should run to his lover or hide from her.

“
You cannot run!” the
voice said, grating at the upper stretches of its possible volume.
For a second, Ipid quivered thinking that devil had read his
thoughts. Then there another distant scream.

Ipid climbed the steps but
heard nothing more.
Where did she go?
Please don’t let her have abandoned me again
, he prayed though he was not sure he wanted to meet the
owner of that voice no matter his predicament. “. . . hide . . .
die . . .” he heard the exhortations resonate from the upper
levels, just the faintest whispers made it to his sanctuary, but
they were almost more terrifying for their distance.

Ipid shook. He stood by
the door and heard footsteps return to the study.
It has to be Eia
, he
told himself.
It has to be.

“
Open the door!” the voice
demanded. It was definitely Eia, her voice falling from murderous
demon to stern mother preparing to deliver the switch.

Fumbling, Ipid lifted the
bar that held the door and pushed it open. “Eia . . . by the . .
.”

“
Shut up, you idiot. What
in Hilaal’s holy name did you do? Can I not leave you for two days
without the whole world falling apart? Can’t you take care of
yourself for five minutes?”

“
I . . . I’m . . . I mean
. . .”

“
I said to shut the fuck
up! I don’t want to hear your sniveling.” Eia turned away. Ipid’s
eyes slowly adjusted to the impossibly bright room, and he saw that
she had her black robes on again. Her face was hidden inside the
cowl, but he could see her mouth curved in a sneer. Her eyes were
sharp and cold.

A glance around the room
revealed a blackened space on the wall broken by the charred
remnants of a skeleton. On the other side, blood was splattered
across the doorway and into the hall. A leg still showed through
the door, the rest of its owner hidden behind the jam. “What . . .
what happened?” Ipid managed to ask as Eia turned from him and
marched to the desk.

“
What do you think
happened? I returned to collect you and found these bastards here
instead, so I gave them what they deserved. Now, gather your
things. We need to go.”

“
I . . . I missed you . .
. where did . . .”

“
Missed me,” Eia snapped.
“Of course you missed me. You can barely dress yourself. You’re
helpless without me. Yet you have the audacity to scorn me! You are
lucky I returned at all.”

“
Scorned . . . Eia I never
. . .”

“
Enough with your excuses.
Get your things before I leave you. Arin can always find another
pet. Now, GO!”

Ipid was almost too
stunned to move. He had never seen Eia like this, could not even
imagine that she had it inside her, but she hit him with a look
that made him truly afraid to be in her presence. He ran in
stumbling strides to the stairs, diverting his eyes from the
mangled bodies of the looters, and hobbled up the steps to his
room.

“
Five minutes and I will
be gone!” Eia yelled. Her voice made his hands shake more than they
already were, made his whole body tremble so that he could barely
unbutton his shirt, wash the wine from his chest, and button a new
one. “Three minutes,” she yelled again as he inspected the cut on
his foot. It wasn’t bad, just enough to give him a limp, so he
pulled a sock over it, slipped his feet in shoes, stuffed a few
shirts, pants, and jackets into a bag, and nearly fell down the
stairs in this rush. He arrived back in the study completely out of
breath, sweating profusely, and foot throbbing so that he thought
he might cry. Yet, he had one more task. He ran to the desk,
arranged the papers, and shoved them into his satchel.

“
Are you ready?” Eia
demanded.

“
Yes, but please, Eia,
please do not let us end our time like this. I am sorry if I
offended you. I wanted to be with you. I still do. Please, you mean
so much to me. I think . . . I think I love you.” Ipid was not sure
what he was saying, was so overwrought that the words spilled out
before he could think about them.

“
Love
me
!” Eia threw back her head and
laughed. Ipid felt his heart fall into his stomach. He staggered.
“You
are
a fool.
Do you think that is what this was? That I could love a toad like
you.” She stepped forward, closing the distance between them. Her
eyes were so frightful through the hood that Ipid retreated until
he was trapped in the corner. Still Eia came until she was almost
on top of him. Her hand reached up to him, touched his cheek. It
was ice cold.

“
Is this what you
thought?” she nearly whispered. “That I, Eialia Oie Alliera, one of
Hilaal’s great disciples, might swoon like a girl over you, that
your great charms were too much for me, that your greatness as a
lover might sway my heart.” She laughed, reached for him with her
other hand, made him jump in fear. “No! I wanted something very
much different from your cock between my legs, though I was willing
to allow it if it would have given me your son. But, in the end,
you could not even give me that, so I had to look for him on my
own. So are you ready to return to your masters, ready to grovel,
ready to serve the Darthur? Because you are of no more use to
me.”

Ipid felt his whole world
shake. His emotions gyrated between sorrow, anger, jealousy,
self-loathing until he thought he might explode. It all seemed so
obvious now.
She was using me. Using me to
get to my son. I was nothing to her.
He
wanted simultaneously to strangle her, stab himself, and fall to
the floor and cry. Then all the emotions were swept away. He felt a
rush of calm, watched uncaring as Eia’s lips moved inside her hood.
Her hand reached out and took his in a firm, but gentle, ice-cold
embrace, and she led him unthinking through the portal that
appeared just behind her.

After a moment of being
torn apart and put back together, Ipid found himself in a
courtyard. The walls of a sizeable inn surrounded him. Several
black-robed figures strode from those walls toward him. He fell to
his knees, felt the emotional torrent return in a paralyzing
flood.

“
I am sorry, my love” Eia
whispered in his ear. “That was necessary to get you here. It was a
great distance to transport you. I needed the full power of your
emotions. I am sorry.” She looked up from him. Ran her hand gently
along his cheek until he looked into her now affectionate eyes. “I
will see you again soon. I promise it, but remember Arin and the
Belab cannot know about us. Walk with care, my love.” And with
that, Eia stood to her full height, strode across the courtyard,
and was gone.

Chapter 12

The
20
^th
Day of Summer

The door was open. Teth
stared at it in disbelief. She had tried that door countless times,
had tried picking its lock, battering it, prying it, begging it.
Nothing had budged the polished wood so much as an inch. And now it
just stood open, waiting for her to enter.

She looked around her,
listened to the smack of the Weavers at their looms, the twitter of
the birds, chatter of the squirrels, rustling of leaves in the
westerly breeze that seemed somehow hotter even than the blistering
air around her. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything
was exactly as it should be for early afternoon. She had waited
until now because the Weavers worked the fields in the morning. It
was only after their lunch that they took their places at the
looms, and she could be sure that they would not see her or
interfere with her plans.

And now that plan was
negated by an open door. The length of rope fell from her hands.
The hook she had spent the morning fashioning from a hoe smashed a
rose, catching its petals beneath its metal expanse.

A trap
, she thought.
But why trap someone
you’ve already captured?
She stepped
toward the door, leaned forward, and looked inside without actually
entering. There were stairs. The door led to stairs, a line of them
that ran to the far wall then doubled back. The ceiling was more
stairs, weaving back and forth, rising in flights to the top. Teth
drew a knife from the back of her pants and stepped silently onto
the first step. She had planned to throw a hook at the top of the
tower until it caught. She was going to climb the outside of the
structure to one of the large windows at the top, slip through, and
find Dasen. It had not been a subtle plan, so her current need for
stealth seemed foolish, but she could not help it.

“
Dasen,” she almost
whispered as she reached the first landing. Wooden doors stood at
either side. She tried them both. They were locked. “Dasen?” she
asked their surfaces. She knocked lightly. “Dasen?” She stepped
back from the door and looked up the stairs. Each landing was the
same, framed by two closed doors. “Dasen!” she screamed this time.
“Dasen, where are you?”

“
It is not yet time,” a
ragged voice answered. It drifted down to her, barely audible yet
clear as the sky outside. “The answers you seek are at the top.
Find me and you shall have them.”

Teth gripped her knife and
took a shaking breath. The voice had not sounded threatening – it
had sounded like a very old man – but she was somehow terrified.
Gathering her courage, she announced, “I’m coming,” and started to
climb.

She stopped at each door
to listen, but there was nothing to hear, and she somehow knew that
the old man was right, the answers were at the top. It suddenly
felt like everything that had happened in the past week was a great
machine, like everything had been constructed to bring her here at
this moment for this reason. She could see the pieces fitting
together. The Weavers’ routine, the boat, the garden, the open
door. It all built to this.

Focused on what she would
find at the top of the stairs, Teth did not see the rock standing
on the otherwise spotless stairs. Her foot came down and turned.
She recovered quickly, splayed her hands to catch herself, and
planted her knife into the only crack that seemed to exist between
the perfectly mortared stones. Her hand slipped forward. The blade
snapped.

Teth caught herself with
no more injury than a bruised knuckle then glared at the wooden
handle she now held and felt the loss as if the blade were standing
in her guts rather than lodged between two stones. She kicked the
stone down the steps and growled. “So this is how it will be?” The
knife handle followed the rock as she stomped to the end of the
stairs and another open door.

“
Come in, my child,” the
voice beckoned.

“
That was my best knife,”
Teth barked. “If you didn’t want me to bring it, why didn’t you
just ask?”

The old man inside the
room laughed, a soft, airy sound like the wheezing of a tiny
bellows. “You know as well as I that you would not have listened.
Now, come in and sit.”

Teth stepped into a large
room. It wrapped around the staircase to either side, taking up an
entire floor of the pentagonal tower. Like the rest of the Weaver
compound, it was lit only by the light filtering through a tall
window high in each of the room’s stone walls. Despite its size,
the room was sparsely furnished. The floor and walls were bare
stone. The windows did not have shutters. The high ceiling showed
wooden beams to support the tower’s final level. A narrow spiral
staircase in one corner led to it. The room itself held nothing
more than a long table with a single chair pulled away and angled
in invitation on Teth’s side. On the other side of that table in a
padded rocking chair was an ancient man.