She thrust her hand at me. “Sit.”
My knees obliged and bent. The faith stone flared in my head but calmed as soon as it started. “So what’s the game, Maeve? The Elven King’s death wasn’t enough? You want a scorched earth?”
“The fate of the world is no game, Connor Grey,” she said.
I laughed. “Right. Of course. And only you can save it by destroying a city.”
She leaned back in the chair and lightly held its arms. “This city’s misfortune was fated a century ago with Convergence. Events merely unfold to their inevitable conclusion.”
“Convergence doomed Boston? Seems like the trouble it has is that you neglected your people here,” I said.
She tilted her head. “I am surprised you think that. Do you know nothing of history?”
“I know you let the Guildhouses rot from within. I know you use defense against the Consortium as an excuse for war. And now that Donor’s out of the way, you think destroying the Elven kingdom will make you the sole fey ruler,” I said.
Her face remained intent, but curious. “And to what purpose have I done all these things, Connor Grey?”
I shrugged. “Good question. Most times I think it’s because you’re a power-hungry asshole.”
“Everyone is driven by power. Without power, kingdoms fall. Realms vanish. Without power, the Wheel of the World does not turn. Of course I’m driven by power, Connor Grey, just like you.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we’re much alike,” I said.
She smirked. A High Queen smirking at me felt more condescending than even I was used to. “The first thing you asked for when you awakened was a weapon,” she said.
That stung a little. “I thought defending myself might be prudent,” I said.
“You sound like Donor.” Her tone indicated that wasn’t a compliment.
I grunted, unflattered. “Was he wrong?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, amused again. “No, actually, but misguided. He never understood that I acted in both our interests. He was selfish that way.”
I tried to process what she was saying, but the sleep spell made my thinking sluggish. “I don’t understand.”
“There seems to be much you don’t understand,” she said.
“You had Donor on the defensive,” I said.
That sly smile was back. “That tends to happen when you declare war on someone.”
“You never declared…. wait, you’re not talking about here, are you? You’re talking about Faerie,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes at me, avid with listening, as if she needed me to say something she was waiting for. “Go on.”
“You remember. You remember Faerie before Convergence,” I said.
“Is that supposition or knowledge?” she asked.
“Are you saying you attacked Alfheim and started the war that caused Convergence?”
“Am I?”
The haze lay across my mind. I tried to shake it off, tried to piece together what she was saying. “You think I know something. That’s why I’m here.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “But you do know something. With every word, you confirm it. When I touched you through the gate in TirNaNog, I suspected as much. Remember what you know, Connor Grey.”
My head refused to clear. “I can’t think with this spell on me. Take it off.”
She murmured a chuckle. “Do you think playing naïve will make me so? Think, sir. Why are you here?”
“Because I know you are responsible for Ceridwen underQueen’s death. I can expose you to the Seelie Court,” I said.
A slight crease formed between her eyebrows. She seemed as confused as I was. “Perhaps once that would have been inconvenient, but no longer. Victory is within my grasp. The chattering of the underKings and -Queens are nothing to me now.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
She leaned her head back, watching me from half-closed eyes. “I am disappointed. I thought that when we met, the situation would become evident to you. I thought you would understand.”
“Understand what? War? Destruction? You’re killing people out there,” I said.
She leaned forward as if trying to press her words into my mind. “Think, Connor. Why am I here? In the place? Why are any of us? It’s a backwater on the world stage, yet here we are. Why are Briallen and Gillen here? And Nigel and Eorla and the rest? Why are the most powerful people in the world gathered here of all places?”
“Because of you,” I said.
Like a mother proud of her child, she lifted her fingers toward me as if trying to coax me to perform. “Close. Very close. Your memory is damaged,” she said.
That was something I knew already. “You’re here to destroy everything,” I said.
“Destruction is the process of creation. Faerie was dying. I was trying to save it for all of us, and Donor refused to help. He would have let all of the Celts perish. I stole Audhumla to save us all.”
Confused, I tucked my chin, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Audhumla was part of the Teutonic creation myth. In the beginning of time, so the story goes, a cow sprang up from the primordial void and provided nourishment to the first beings to come to life.
I stared at Maeve in disbelief. “You stole their cow?”
She shrugged. “I thought everyone knew I like cows.” My jaw dropped, and she laughed. “I am not without humor, sir. Audhumla manifests as a cow because that’s how the simple Teutonic mind works. She’s not a cow. She’s a metaphor of power—of creation, Connor. I was trying to save Faerie. I couldn’t let it die. I needed Audhumla to revitalize the realm of Faerie.”
I still couldn’t get around the manifestation part. “You stole a cow,” I said.
She scoffed at my feeble attempt to understand her. “I stole creation. I stole destiny. I stole the spark of all things so that all things could exist. It’s not a cow, you fool. It’s a metaphor for the power of the Wheel of the World,” she said.
“And all those people you listed—you—you’re all here, now, because, uh, the cow’s here?”
Satisfied, she leaned back again. I took her for mad, but she seemed much too calm and confident for the crazy talk. “Now you see. I have spent over a century diverting attention elsewhere, so that none would suspect the power hidden in this city. I kept Donor off-balance, concerned about his petty kingdom abroad while I sought the tools to access the power here. You were gifted the sword against my wishes. In my surprise, the spear claimed you. The faith stone has fallen into your hands. I have them all now, save the bowl. I know the bowl is here. I felt it when I arrived. I know you must have it. You’ve drawn the others to you. The bowl is no different. Give it to me so that Faerie may live.”
I shook my head. “Give you the power to destroy everything I know in the name of creating everything you want? I won’t have that blood on my hands.”
She stood and placed the tip of the spear against my chest. “I have no problem with your blood on my hands.”
I smirked up at her. “Then you’ll never know where the bowl is.”
She pressed the spear forward. “It matters not. I have the spear and the sword. I can pull the faith stone from your mind. They will bring the bowl into my hands. They are all a piece of the Wheel of the World. They call to each other. With the three together, the bowl will arrive. I would have you at my side again when that happens, but a Faerie without you is better than no Faerie at all.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
She gripped me by the head, her palm resting against my forehead as her fingers clutched my scalp. Her hand glowed with essence, and she brought her face close to mine. “You must remember who you are. It’s true I started the war, but I didn’t cause Convergence. You did.”
I screamed as her fingers bored into my skull and
40
Black.
I drifted in a sea of black, a thick sluggish current that neither warmed nor cooled, a
neutral texture that clung to my skin. I moved, my sense of balance registering a slow tumble through the black. It was black, then black, then black.
I didn’t know how long I drifted before I realized I was painless. I had lived with pain for so long, I no longer felt like it. It felt like me. Numbness had replaced feeling; indifference to pain had replaced reaction to it.
Dazed, I tumbled, my mind blank, my thoughts disconnected. Black was black. It was a thing, confronting me with a nothingness of nothingness, relentless and infinite. I tumbled, and it was black, then black, then black.
“Focus.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. A curiosity surged through me at the break of the monotony, but only for a moment. The black returned, black and silent. Even as I considered I had imagined it, I lost the sense of it and faded away into the black.
“Grey.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. I had heard a sound that formed a word that formed a meaning. I was the sound that was the word that was the meaning. I was Grey. I knew this and remembered this and held on to this as the idea faded away into the black.
I remembered then the other word. I had a memory of another word. My name was not the first word, the first sound. It had been another word with a sound and a meaning, and I knew that, too.
“Focus, Grey.”
I heard the words, pausing as I heard them, wondering whether I heard the words in my memory or heard them again in the black. It mattered not in the black. It felt the same. I heard the words and the memory and held them in my mind and remembered who I was.
A pinpoint of light stirred in the black. I saw it, then black, then black. I was tumbling again. I saw it, then saw it, then black. I saw it. The pinpoint of light stayed in my vision. It stayed, no longer shifting to black. I was still. The pinpoint of light in the dark moved, and I saw it and knew it for what it was: essence in the black.
There was light.
Light floated in the distance, essence light that soared toward me. Bursts of color flared, fireworks against the black, fading to darkness. I wondered if the colors were essence or simply a physiological reaction to the enveloping darkness. I wondered if they were the afterimages of essence I had seen, memory images of the colors of essence or levels of essence I couldn’t normally sense with light. The colors flashed and flared, then faded, and always the darkness returned, except the pinpoint of light remained, growing in the black
The pinpoint changed, became shape, first a circle, then an oval, then a line. The light became what it was: essence in the black, essence moving toward me, essence I recognized, the shape of a body signature, shifting from white to blue to evergreen. The body signature arrived at last or in an instant. I wasn’t sure which. I was sure of the body signature, though, and of the face that belonged to that signature and floated in front of me.
“Am I dead?” I asked Bergin Vize.
I had spent years as a Guild agent chasing Vize, elf terrorist and chronic adversary. I remembered that now. I had lost my abilities because of him—and he had lost his. He returned to Boston again and again, and each time I faced him and lost, until the last time. The last time he showed his face, he died in the destruction of a building. I watched him fall. I did not see him rise. No one found him. He was buried under tons of concrete and stone, the building he helped destroy, his tomb.
The face before me—Bergin Vize’s face—did not smile. “Not quite. Not yet.”
“I watched you die,” I said.
“It’s not important,” he said.
My mind cleared, a lifting of fog and confusion. I was floating in darkness with Bergin Vize. “I think it is. If you are dead, I’m hallucinating. If you’re alive, I need to kill you.”
He did smile then. “After all this time, you still see only two alternatives? This has always been about us but never between you and me.”
“Here we go again, Vize. Tell me how you want to save the world by destroying it,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not me. Maeve.”
Maeve. Of course, Maeve. She wanted to destroy the world. Vize did, too. Everybody wanted to destroy the world to make it something else. “I think she killed me. I think I’m dead. TirNaNog is gone, and I’m left with looking at you in the dark for eternity,” I said.
Vize stared, serene and patient. In the black, his body shimmering, essence forming the shape of him except his right side. Where his arm should have been was nothingness, the stain of the same darkness in my head manifesting itself on his arm. Something glittered in the darkness, though, down where his hand should have been. Something familiar. “Maeve has made a fatal error, Grey. She does not know I am here. She doesn’t know about this place. Even better, she does not believe it exists. There lies my final chance.”
“All right. I’ll play, Vize. Where am I then?” I asked.
His face shifted, the essence of him flickering and re-forming. “You know where we are. It’s a place and a thing and an idea. It is the same thing that’s been consuming us for the last three years. We are in the Gap. We are in the darkness that is nothing. We are here and not here.”
I reached up and grabbed him by the neck, felt his pulse beneath my grip. “How about this? Does this feel here? Want to rethink that nothing and not-here crap?”
He smiled, his face fading in and out of darkness. “Like to like, Grey. You are essence here, as am I. It matters not whether we are physical or ethereal. How many times have you tried to kill me, Grey? How many times have I tried to kill you?”
I shoved him. He drifted a few feet away. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Vize lifted his dark hand, the hand that wore the gold ring that had ended our fight and caused us to lose our abilities. His hand and arm had been consumed with the dark mass like my mind had been. The ring burned in the darkness that was his hand, a mote that glowed bright with life in the black. “Do you remember?” he asked.
“I remember enough. I lost my abilities because of that ring,” I said.
“Focus, Grey. Remember,” he said.
I had been trying to remember for three years what had happened the night I fought Vize. I had tracked him down to a nuclear power plant he was planning to blow up. We fought. He lost control of his ring, and we lost our abilities. “Stop saying that.”
“Do you know what a soul stone is?” he asked.
People made soul stones as safety measures. Split a piece of your body essence—or even a significant amount—bond it to a static object to create an essence ward, and, well, don’t die. Without the destruction of someone’s life force— what some called the soul—and its container—a body or a ward—a person could receive a fatal wound and live. All that needed to be done to save them was the uniting of the soul stone with the body. “Of course I do.”
“We made a soul stone, Grey. We made a soul stone together. We saved the world,” he said.
I frowned. “You and me? We made a soul stone? Not likely.”
Vize held his hand out, a glitter of essence in the darkness. “The ring, Grey. We remade the ring with a piece of our souls. It was the only way to stop her from killing us because we are the only ones who can stop her from killing everyone.”
I closed my eyes, but it didn’t matter. Vize registered in my sensing ability, his body signature adrift in the dark. If I was dead and the Christian hell existed, this would be it. I was going to pay for everything I had done by being taunted by Vize forever. That was what I got for destroying TirNaNog.
“TirNaNog is not gone. It is here, and it is not here,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can read minds. Great.”
“Focus, Grey. You can do the same with me,” he said.
I sighed, or at least thought I did, alone there in the dark with my nemesis gnawing at my mind. I didn’t want to focus. I didn’t want to think or remember. I wanted to be left alone. Drifting was a decent option for a change, especially if I was dead.
/> “You won’t die. You can’t yet,” Vize said.
“Well, you certainly won’t,” I said.
“Listen to me” he said.
“You’re not here,” I said.
“She will condemn you as Donor condemned me. You will drift here with me on the edge of death in an ever-present now because our soul stone lies buried beneath the Guildhouse. We will drift here because we are tainted with the darkness. The two people Maeve cannot destroy, lost in the one place she cannot reach,” he said.
“I knew this was hell,” I said.
“Hell is a state of mind here, brother.”
We drifted, not speaking. It might have been a moment or an eternity. We drifted.
“She has the sword and the spear, Grey. She is reaching for the stone. Her hand burns down through your mind as we speak. She will hunt down the bowl. She will destroy whoever touches it,” he said.
“Why would she destroy everything?” I asked.
“Because she reaches beyond her reach. She thinks she can control what cannot be controlled. She thinks she can turn the Wheel of the World, but the Wheel of the World turns as It will,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t care anymore. I closed my eyes and let my body tumble through the darkness.
“Meryl will die,” he said.
I opened my eyes and grabbed him, my hands burying themselves not in clothes, but his body signature. “What did you say?”
No satisfaction showed on his face, no mocking. “She will die, and you will never get to tell her you’re sorry.”
I shoved him. He didn’t drift away. “She knows,” I said.
“And I know you. I see it in your mind. You need to say good-bye. You need to face her. Call the bowl,” he said.
“I can’t call it. It’s not like the spear,” I said.
“But it is. Look inside yourself, see what the Wheel of the World has granted you to see. The bowl is the physical representation of bounty. It exists in the Wheel of the World beyond its physical form. We are beyond ourselves here. Call the bowl, Grey, and I will show you truth.”
Undone Deeds cg-6 Page 24
