“You don’t know love,” Caryl said, her lips thick with white. Before the words were out a cupped chin filled her throat with familiar soft moans. “You don’t know anything at all.”
Mykel stood shocked, clothed like a decent man. He looked to the severed Lazarus head, for guidance, for defense, for anything that would still the increasing, damning din of moans. Lazarus ascended. Mykel followed the trail of blood-drops left in his wake; he imagined them to be from his own heart, plucked and torn. That would have hurt less.
“Infidel.” John Jekai was bent nearly double, a sword split through skin and spine. His face was drawn and tight without any trace of pain. A breath passed and suddenly he was standing up, whole again... only to thrust the blade back in with his own two hands. “You will die. I swear it.” Blood erupted from the throat before the final word passed, yet it was clear as crystal through the vermilion. “By all the words of God Himself, I will see you dead!” And he split himself again. Over and over.
At last the red line came to an end. The monster lay before them, face split in twin halves, its square-cut eyes glaring flatly. Within those eyes were a net of small, black-lined diamonds. Mykel felt if he stared long enough he could tell the future within those eyes. “What... is it?” he asked. Somehow his mouth felt filled with honey. “What’s in there?”
“The truth.” Still now, the blood-drops built an ever-spreading pool of crimson below, rippling like the waves of some grand, tainted ocean. “The truth that everyone fears. You must enter alone.”
“A... alone?” Speaking was an effort; his tongue felt made of cotton. Before him the monster’s face pulled inward to a maw of flawless shadow, eating all the light that dared touch it. No man could step forth and hope to step out whole, and yet his feet moved of their own will. The shadows stretched for him, beckoned him with long narrow fingers. Chill seared his skin to burning.
He did not know how long he fell. Or even if he did. Weightless, deaf, black stretching forth to choke off all shade. Only the slow spinning told him he moved at all. Even then that was slowly being denied him; the wind that ruffled sleeve to skin fading from life and then memory. He fell, with only the voices for company.
“He’s a cripple. What can you expect of him?”
“A strange one, to be sure. I wonder why the old woman wanted it.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Lady Fenrir is daft.”
“She’s always been that way, loving odd things. Why, when she was six she tried to save a horse with a broken leg. Poor thing. She wouldn’t let the doctors near it. She was screaming so loud she frightened the damn beast to death.”
“That’s not all. Her family’s got a history of queerness. Why, her brother was born a fool.”
“You don’t say.”
“From my mother’s teat. She was the maid who weaned him. His mother wouldn’t dare touch him. They had to keep him, of course. Old Creat was always the stubborn one about pride. The old man finally had to put a knife to his throat to save the House.”
“Why, I never. And Lady Fenrir...”
“Yes. A soft spot for strays, I suppose. She always wanted to help the helpless.”
Anger burned while despair flayed. Mother was not a fool to be flayed so casually with whips of gossip. Yet the dead arm might have been a poison stone in the ocean of their lives for all the good he did them. He remembered the exact moment when he realized he was a burden. Some nobleman with hopes of currying favor brought children for dinner, and the oldest played with the arms-masters before supper. Tradition demanded that the heirs match steel; or at least wooden staves with blunted tips.
Mykel couldn’t even lift the stave.
Mykel had to prod Kurtis forward, to get him to play. A mistake. The words chimed like cruel ghosts, haunting him. The other nobleman’s boy was more a fattened sow than the heir to royalty. Kurtis beat him down easily. In the throes of victory there he saw the glint of superiority, clear as crystal. I should have been the one to battle. Only he hadn’t known his left arm was worse than dead. No one had bothered to tell him. Only snicker.
Suddenly there was ground, slamming the air from his lungs, cold and greasy against his skin. Slowly pulling himself to his feet, Mykel blinked. The fall made every muscle groan for mercy. Not only that; scarlet flashes cut across his sight. He shook his head once, twice to clean out the cobwebs, and gaped at what lay before him.
The courtyard burbled with all the things of nobility. Fountains of lapis lazuli sprouted never-ending arcs of crystalline water from embossed fish mouths. Red-roofed houses scattered across the square in a crooked zigzag, a group of men clustered busily about each one. Drawing closer he saw a manor stretching high like an infant castle, with turrets and towers chasing after the red-stoned peaks.
He recognized this place. Fenrir Manor. Home, or the closest he could call. He walked through the wolf-embossed doors, unguarded for the first time in memory, and stepped into the manor.
Memory failed within where it had served without. This was not the warren of manor halls he remembered dimly. In truth Mykel barely remembered it all save for the paths that cut from the library to certain locales: the kitchen, the main hall, his bedroom. There were many rooms beneath his concern. The bedroom would have been so if it were up to he alone; Mykel had no qualms of sleeping in the library. Fathers were a stubborn sort, however, and so the librarian was forced to rise from his torch-lighted abode once a night to lay in quarters uncomfortable. And they call me foolish.
The library. Again his feet carried him without request, almost knowing the desired path better than he. He traced the path back in his mind as he walked it, the memory flame-bright in his mind, black at the sides where opening into unfamiliar lanes. The doors where the path branched into corridors never touched by his eye were darker than nightshade. Once he willed his feet to stop, blinked when he realized they had obeyed—why wouldn’t they obey? —and neared the shadow-door.
A finger dipped in the darkness was akin to a stone tossed in a pond at midnight. Ripples cascaded across the lapping shadows, here and gone in an instant. In those ripples Mykel imagined he heard laughter, soft and mocking, chiming in time with the dark’s pulsing. Laughter and screams and whispers of sweet nothings, those and a thousand more unnamed to cognitive reason. They blended together into a cacophony in his ears. Only when the finger was released did he know there was a difference; stark flatness boomed against the scintillating sounds. Stranger still was that there no trace of shadow stuck on his finger, nothing at all except for a sudden hardness in the darkness. It would not give way to touch or shove afterwards.
Mykel went on. It was no use trying at what he had no purpose to be doing. Those paths were beneath him. There were other, more important places to be. Clinging to that conclusion he let his feet carry him forward.
One step took him a yard’s distance forward and diagonal across the manor. A door embossed in a cradle of gold and silver, which in itself cradled a mosaic of two wolves soaring towards the stars. Lord Fenrir’s chamber. This was not the chamber he desired, though the path was well-lit by memories of lectures and rebukes. Mykel willed his boots to take him elsewhere, but no matter how hard he commanded his feet didn’t budge. Only his arm had any access from the paralysis. A hand to take hold of the wolf-head knob. Sighing, Mykel twisted the knob and entered the chamber, hoping against hope that a step would be a mile once more.
It was not. He remembered the high-vaulted walls, the broad chiseled pillars dressed in multi-shaded mosaics, the tapestries that fluttered like old flags on the walls. The battles and wars they depicted only aided the feeling of banner, waving in the wind to remind those too young of the bloodshed to keep them alive. And to remind too old to ever forget of what they had done to keep those children’s chances to become m
en. Men, Mykel recalled bitterly, with the arms necessary to be men.
A desk lay at the head of the room, polished oak and pine, the rarest in all of Amden. At the chair that was twin to the desk sat a man clad in black-felt cloak and sable armor, obviously ill at ease with merely sitting. The thud of Mykel’s step stirred him from a sleep he didn’t really hold to. He rose, the edged cloak sweeping slightly, revealing glittering wires of gold in shoulder and breastplate, a mosaic in itself depicting wolves and moons of all shapes and sizes. In the crook of his left arm, massive and roped with muscle, was a broad war-helm, laden with wolf-fur and tipped with a wolf’s jaws. Mykel almost wished the helm were on. He could never really take that broad, stony face with its haze-eyed weights bearing down on him.
“Boy,” Laurence Fenrir growled slightly. “What are you doing here? I thought I send you to your chamber. Kurtis is gravely wounded from your play-acting. You know steel is nothing to jest with.”
Mykel’s thoughts came together with a clarity so crystal it almost hurt. This was not the present. This was something that had already come and gone. Years gone, if memory was willing to serve. Obviously Fenrir did not see him as he was now but as he was then. Strangely this did not bother Mykel as much as he thought it might.
“Well? What are you doing? Go back to your chambers before I summon servants to drag you. I have no time right now.”
Words came from his lips of their own accord, words thin with a reedy tone of youth long since lost. “We were supposed to pose today. For the painter. For the portrait.” There were plenty of portraits of he and Kurtis around the chamber and the halls. It seemed only natural to have at least one with him. At least it was natural to his young mind.
Fenrir’s face fell for a flicker of an instant. Only a flicker. “That will not happen. I have canceled that appointment.”
“B-but why?” He watched himself stamp a foot angrily like... like a little child. “You promised!”
“If it was so important then you shouldn’t have misbehaved.” Fenrir said tightly. “This is the consequences of your actions. You shouldn’t have hit Kurtis.”
“B-but I didn’t!” he sobbed. “He deliberately tripped me, and I fell...”
“Enough!” Fenrir loomed over him, a giant of shadow with razor-sharp eyes. Mykel felt himself shrink in their presence, shrink and shrink until he was naught but a mouse. “I will not have you simpering like a child! Go to your room and stay there until you can behave your age. Think about what you have done.” Putting a hand to his brow, he sighed and added. “We will talk more of this later. Go.” He glanced at Mykel’s still form and growled, “Well? What are you waiting for? Go!”
Mykel felt a pulling, a tugging away. Glancing back, he saw a child’s ghost turn and stalk angrily from the room. Me. Even then there were no tears to be shed, while other children would run weeping from the room. It was a strength Mykel was proud of, something to lord over the other children; mental superiority above their meager physical superiority. It was all he had.
He had thought about it, long and hard, tinged with the anger of a child that had never really disappeared. Fenrir was a soldier first and a father second. Thus he was a taskmaster third, since fathers themselves have to juggle the roles of friend and taskmaster. He might not wish punishment. In fact, Mykel knew now he did not want to impose it. Later years would find the aging soldier fumbling new attempts for the portrait in idle conversation, one last grab for the closeness that failed them in his child’s years. Fathers had to be taskmasters, had to impose punishment for bad deeds over the needs for tutorage and friendship. Mykel had slowly come to know this, even as a child. Knowing did not help the hurting.
Mykel opened his mouth to say something to Fenrir. What he didn’t exactly know. Scream at him, perhaps, for all the times he passed him over for Kurtis. The boy grew into arrogance, bred by heredity and all the promises endowed by that inheritance. The father could never change from that hard unflinching knight, could only pretend to change. Mykel knew this as surely as he knew the weakness crippling his fingers like a comfortable dull throb. For all the virtue in his deeds Fenrir had betrayed himself for the need for raising an heir. This set Mykel’s heart rumbling with black thunder. Of anyone alive he surely had the right to scream.
But he did not. His jaw closed, his teeth ground. The sword of Fenrir’s predicament was of the double-edged variety. Mykel knew this too. Shouting words that served no purpose would prove him a fool’s tongue. What does it matter? He turned to the door and made his way from the chamber. What does any of it matter?
A step carried him a league, back and forth to a tower that was on the other side of the castle, if memory served correctly. Ironic, since he had tried long and hard not to remember. A circular chamber draped in tapestries of fertility gods both recent and long-forgotten, cradling babes that grew into great men.
Usually the chamber was shorn of visitors, but today a score of men stood eyeing each other. All were dressed in a patchwork garb of respectable silks; all cradled a different item into their soft-as-cheese hands: ranging from a few silver-bladed tools to a small black box squirming as if alive. Only the faint ripples told the vessel was of glass. Mykel squirmed in unease at that one, and at the man who held it. Even though he naught knew him, not then nor now. He was tainted enough.
The eyeing ceased when a woman swept into the chamber, bedecked in black garb that underscored her slim figure. Dark auburn eyes held over high-set cheekbones betrayed her noble birth, and set the men to further attention than they already were. Behind him followed a boy, clad in only his smallclothes, smiling as though he’d expected the chamber to be made of candy. Perhaps he had, Mykel shrugged. He never remembered. He had never tried to remember.
“Mommy,” the boy said in sing-song. “What are we doing here? Is the bard here? I want to hear Sefiros Cayokite.”
“No, sweet one. There are physicians here. They want to examine you.”
The boy stopped with big wide eyes. The condition of his clothes was strange but not unusual; only his mother and a nameless physician saw his frail chest and limbs. Now, confronted before a virtual army of ragtag-silked men—at least, it seemed an army to his little eyes—the boy felt an odd kind of fear freezing his legs. His mother was one thing. A nameless physician he’d never see again was one thing. An entire army of physicians, and suddenly the white smallclothes seemed naught enough, and he hunched, fearing they might see through them to his adolescent nudity.
“Honey,” called Mommy. Vaguely he reminded himself that only children call mothers “Mommy.” Even so she might as well be a thousand miles away. “Honey. Walk for the physicians. Walk back and forth.”
Numbly he did as she asked. He tried to keep his eyes away from the physicians’ curious, analyzing gazes, tried to recite Sefiros Cayokite tales silently to ignore the heat prickling in-between his shoulder-blades. It took forever to shuffle over to one side of the chamber and back again. When Mommy called for him he rushed over, hoping they didn’t see his red face. They couldn’t put the cloak over him fast enough.
“Yes, Lady Fenrir. I think I see the problem. I think a process such as this will be required...”
The boy huddled within the cloak, not listening nor caring to what the mean old doctors were saying. Mykel felt a pang of sympathy for the specter, then told himself he was a fool for doing so. Sympathy would not banish the vision. Glancing back, he saw the score of doctors nod in agreement, and his eyes locked hotly upon the last of them. They held a wriggling black box. Sympathy would not stop the leeches.
“Mommy, can we go now?”
“Not yet, sweet one. These physicians want to try something first.”
No more. He didn’t want to see the black demons with their black jaws. Not again. Throwing up an arm he
leapt towards the specters now leaving the room in a rag-tag procession—
—and landed on a familiar stairwell. The library. He felt older now, the dissonance of ghosted youth faint in the back of his mind. Faint but still there. This time he led his feet down the spiraling stairs, the darkness broken by a chain of soft torch-light. In his hands he tossed a few gold coins, twinkling as he caught them. Silently an epiphany blared in his head.
I know where this is. Or rather, when.
The younger Mykel continued tossing the coins as he walked, watching how the glint chased across the gold. The second half of his monthly stash. He had spent the month’s first half upon a certain red-raven lass he saw at one of Fenrir’s symposiums. Looking back, he saw how craven he was, face red as a beet, heat pricking like knives along his skin. It was a wonder he found himself talking to her without his mind blanking in word’s mid-choice. It was a miracle that the gold had not melted in his palm as he gave it to her. She even understood his request for a secret locale to hide his inexperienced groans... and the lack of her own, he was sure. The modesty, at that moment, gave him a flash of purity within the tawdry slips of silk draping her, the gold-gilded girdle singing as it shifted with her luxurious thighs. A ludicrous thing, he saw now, something that further defined his pathetic standing before meeting her.
In any case, the deed was done, gold was greased, and they parted. Yet there was something about her that pulled him, tugged at his heart as if it were a moth to the flame of her lips and breasts and taut buttocks. So he scraped every coin for fifteen days straight and searched her out. Asked her to come to the library, to the archeological section. He had smiled writing that. So many others had spent their seeds in the folds of that place, tearing concentration asunder while barring him in a cage of indecision. Now he would be among those who took their modern conquests. His heart was almost as hot as the bulge straining his breeches.
Sefiros Eishi: Chased By Flame Page 14
