Transformation (55 page)
Authors: Carol Berg
Ah, fool. See what is before you.
The sky was not lifeless, any more than Aleksander’s desert was lifeless. Winging its way through the low clouds was a bird, a solitary patch of white against the looming darkness. I smiled and launched myself from the cliff, ignoring the sticky warmth on the arm I had kept pressed to my side as I rested, ignoring the fresh trickling wetness below my ribs. Across the uneasy waves I followed the bird, sure that I would find what I sought in the midst of the watery desert. “Thank you, my love,” I whispered, and a soft breath of wind caressed my cheek.
The sky was not lifeless, any more than Aleksander’s desert was lifeless. Winging its way through the low clouds was a bird, a solitary patch of white against the looming darkness. I smiled and launched myself from the cliff, ignoring the sticky warmth on the arm I had kept pressed to my side as I rested, ignoring the fresh trickling wetness below my ribs. Across the uneasy waves I followed the bird, sure that I would find what I sought in the midst of the watery desert. “Thank you, my love,” I whispered, and a soft breath of wind caressed my cheek.
It was an island fortress, poking up from the gray water like a fist. I circled, hunting for some weakness, and I believed I’d found it on the battlements, where a small wooden door led into one of the towers. I landed on a stone parapet and changed the silver knife into an ax.
“Come out,” I said. “There’s nowhere else to hide.” I raised the ax. The wraith appeared before me, holding out its hands as if to stay my blows. I paid it no mind, but struck the door. Twice. Three times. The wood began to splinter. My anger, my impatience, everything pent up for sixteen years was mustered into the blows of that ax. I could have destroyed the stone battlement itself with my fury.
But the wraith took on more solid form ... Aleksander’s form. It did not speak, but brandished a quite lethal sword, threatening me away from the door.
“So you’ve come out,” I said. “I thank you for not forcing me to dismantle your refuge. Shall we get this done?”
The wraith did not speak and did not attack, just held its ground. So I changed my ax for a sword and went after it. I had no time for games. A blizzard of feints and blows. Ordinarily the wings gave me more in power, flexibility, and mobility than they hampered in weight, but not that day. The shredded one had little strength and could not furl tightly when I needed it to. Yet even so, I did not fall, for never did the apparition attack. When I stepped back, it did also. I could not understand it. What was it defending, when it had summoned me there?
“Can you not find me?” The voice came, not from the Aleksander I had been fighting, but from a second apparition that materialized just behind me. Hoping I would not have to fight both at once, I gave him no time to taunt. I spun, ducked a wicked slash, and grazed his shoulder with an upward cut. He growled and came after me. Advantage. Disadvantage. Forward. Backward. Battle unending ... unrelenting ... unthinking ... no difference between the blade and the arm that wielded it. I became a whirlwind, a hurricane of edged steel and anger ... and every time I gained an advantage, he would disappear and shift position. I knew how to manage such a fight. Each time he began anew, I watched and learned how the manifestation was to be different, and I adjusted my technique. Eventually we would finish it. Eventually he would make a mistake. I would not falter. I would not.
Across the battlements, up onto the merlons, teetering on the edge of the vast drop to the rocks and the sea with my left wing weak and dragging, my lungs on fire, half of my body slathered in blood that I feared was mostly my own. The demon laughed and dropped back to the battlement. I leaped from my merlon across to another, closer, ready to sweep down on him ... when he vanished.
In mindless, exhausted rage I switched the sword to the ax again and attacked the door. It was almost off its hinges. “Come out. Come out and fight. No more play. Finish it.”
“Breach these walls, and you will have the battle you desire.” The voice echoed in my head.
I swung again, but the silent wraith stepped forward and insisted on preventing me. Why were there two of them? How was it possible? Maybe this one wasn’t there at all. The blood flowed unchecked from my side and my leg. I was getting dizzy, seeing two or three of everything. I couldn’t trust my seeing. Laughter and voices came from every side. “... help me ... slave ... get out and warn them ... pitiful, groveling vermin ...” I whipped my head from one side to another, trying to use my single working ear to judge where the demon might appear next.
Galadon’s testing, Catrin’s warnings drummed with my exhausted heartbeats. “Your senses are your last defense. Know when they are compromised. If you’ve lost, get out. Dying just to prove you cannot win profits nothing. Honor, pride, and foolhardy death are luxuries a Warden cannot afford.” My knees were like straw. My sword arm quivered with the strain, scarcely able to lift the blade tip from the ground. I could not get a full breath without risk of passing out from the fire in my side.
It wasn’t going to work. Even if I got the door open and found the demon, I had nothing left with which to fight. I stepped back, bent double with the pain in my side, heaving for breath and hoping I could hold myself together long enough to limp back to the portal. Another day. If I could survive ... if Aleksander could hold ... I could try again.
The silent apparition held back, protecting the door, his face pale and rigid, very like the face on a stone table so far away. Unyielding.
“I will free him,” I said, defeat bitter on my tongue.
The specter nodded and reached for my sword, placing the tip in the center of its breast. I stared, uncomprehending.
Breach these walls ... the service I require of you ... aid me in this conquest. . . .
Like a trumpet fanfare the echoes of the demon’s taunting blared through my muddled head. I gaped at my blood-smeared sword and at the image of the Prince that stood before me. Aleksander. Not a mockery, not some monstrous concoction of demon shape-shifting, but the true image that bore his need and his desperation, that still fought to give me his message, though the demon had tormented him into silence.
Like a trumpet fanfare the echoes of the demon’s taunting blared through my muddled head. I gaped at my blood-smeared sword and at the image of the Prince that stood before me. Aleksander. Not a mockery, not some monstrous concoction of demon shape-shifting, but the true image that bore his need and his desperation, that still fought to give me his message, though the demon had tormented him into silence.
And this place? Merciful Valdis, what was I doing? He had trusted me to understand. He had sent Kiril the note so that I would know he would be with me. Ready. But I’d failed to heed him. Instead, I’d led the demon right to his hiding place and done half the work to destroy it.
“Oh, my lord, I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”
And now it was too late. Aleksander was calling on me to redeem my promise to kill him rather than leave him to become a monster, and I could not even do that. My sword slipped from my hand that could no longer grip, and clattered onto the stone. I tried to shape the wind, but a wave of dizziness overwhelmed me, and I sank to my knees. The chill of death crept into my body and my soul, while demon music began to twine itself about my limbs, and insinuate itself into my being, a sick, cold emptiness, a promise of unending misery and everlasting despair. As my life bled away, I called up spells to hold back the demon music. I croaked out words of protection and pressed my arm to my side to hold in the blood.
But I couldn’t do it. I was not enough.
The wraith stood watching ... waiting ... his hand outstretched as if I still had something left to give him.
You are not alone.
The whisper came from inside me and around me, a faint accompaniment to the clamor of the demon.
The whisper came from inside me and around me, a faint accompaniment to the clamor of the demon.
I wanted to laugh, but it came out a grotesque moan. Of course I was alone. I knew no other way. If I were the Warrior of Two Souls, perhaps I’d have another soul to give him. I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
But he did not withdraw his hand. Each one of us had pulled the other from the depths of pain and despair ... in Capharna, in Avenkhar, in the mud of his kitchen yard, in the tower of the Summer Palace. Perhaps it had come around again. Perhaps it was that he had something left to give me. Aleksander had come to this place because I told him that if we combined my power and his strength, no one could stand against us. But I had not listened to myself. I had tried to do as I always had done ... fight the battle alone. What if the Warrior of Two Souls was exactly that? Two ... together.
With my last shred of will, I reached out.
A strong and gentle hand reached under my elbow, lifted me up, and guided me through the door into the fortress.
Time has little meaning within the human soul. We are as we have been since birth and as we will be until death and beyond, the changing landscape only the face of an unchanging spirit. I was not long in that luminous place that was Aleksander’s refuge, the bit of himself he had managed to keep whole. The wraith disappeared as soon as I was inside. No words were exchanged, and I saw no further manifestation of Aleksander’s body. It was only a few moments’ rest and peace alone in the light. There was a fountain of cool, sweet water, and I gulped it down with the wry observation that I might see the stuff spouting out of all the holes in me. An observer might think I was part of the fountain. I bathed my face and washed the blood from my side and my leg. I believed it was Aleksander that had me laughing as I bound up my wounds with the shreds of my clothes. “Can’t you keep yourself covered?” I imagined him saying. “I give you clothes and what do you do but lose them again? I thought Ezzarians were a modest people.”
The storm of the demon’s wrath was breaking on the walls as my weakness was washed away. “He will not breach them,” I said as I stood up again, refreshed in body and spirit, trusting that the Prince would hear me. “Together we will have him out of here.” And indeed when I stepped out upon the battlements and picked up my sword, Aleksander was with me, for my body and my wings shone with his silvery luminescence, casting light upon the dark ruins of his soul.
The Demon Lord came after me then, shifting forms as rapidly as the desert sand moves with the wind. His power was incredible, but no match for the combined power of Aleksander and me. A man with four eyes and six arms. We tangled him in a lightning bolt. A fire-tongued dragon. We confused it with torrents of rain and drove a spear into its throat. A raging shengar. I, we, laughed at that and took its head in one stroke. A beast of living stone. Images of Aleksander, of Ysanne, of Rhys, of Dmitri, of my father. But all were flawed. Now there was light to see with, the imperfections were clear. The demon did not know them any more than it knew me, any more than it knew the Warrior we had become. Aleksander had not revealed my name.
In the end it was the green heart of a three-headed serpent that I stabbed with the silver knife, while choking its meaty neck with a leg hold and blocking its six fangs with my damaged wing. I felt the heart stop beating under my fist, yet the body did not dissolve into a new and more ferocious monster as had happened every time thus far. My left hand clamped about the cool oval in the pouch that hung from my sword belt. With every breath of melydda I had left, I focused my sight and discerned the shape of the demon that was crawling from the serpent’s body.
“Delyrae engaor. Hyssad!”
Look upon your nothingness and begone. The horrific wail as the demon looked upon itself in the Luthen mirror came near ruining my undamaged ear. The creeping shape grew still, paralyzed by seeing its own image. “Now is the time I present your choice,” I said, my voice hoarse after the long hours of battle. “You have made a bargain with the Aife for all vessels known as the Khelid, based on this single combat. Your bargain is now forfeit. Do you yield and command your cohorts to yield?”
“Delyrae engaor. Hyssad!”
Look upon your nothingness and begone. The horrific wail as the demon looked upon itself in the Luthen mirror came near ruining my undamaged ear. The creeping shape grew still, paralyzed by seeing its own image. “Now is the time I present your choice,” I said, my voice hoarse after the long hours of battle. “You have made a bargain with the Aife for all vessels known as the Khelid, based on this single combat. Your bargain is now forfeit. Do you yield and command your cohorts to yield?”
The grating horror that was demon speech hissed in my head. “You will pay for this, slave. Do not think our battle is over. There is another yet to come.” But its words were empty. With much writhing and protest, the command was given.
When I was sure it was done, I continued. “For you, Gai Kyallet, there is no further choice. You are no longer an elemental spirit, a storm that returns its water to the sea when spent. You have taken on the mortal aspect of your victims, and you have violated the laws of humankind. Therefore in the name of the Queen of Ezzaria and the Emperor of the Derzhi, I declare your existence ended.” And with my knife of silver, I killed it.
“It is done, my prince,” I whispered, kneeling on the serpent’s carcass. And as the dawn broke over the distant horizon, I summoned the wind to carry me back to the portal and Ysanne.
Chapter 35
I knew something wasn’t right when I heard the bees forming words out of their incessant buzzing. I knew it was bees, because somewhere beyond my eyelids was a flickering pattern of light and shadow, and the delightful warmth on my face could be nothing but the morning sun. A perfectly reasonable place for bees. A stirring of air tickled my nose, its damp green scent speaking of the last coolness of morning before a hot day. I knew I ought to move before I got stung, but the warmth held me down as if the sunbeams carried the weight of lead. I decided to risk the bees just for the pleasure of staying where I was. And it was certainly intriguing to hear their speech.
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