“Lord-Inquisitors hunt us?” Enk asked, testing the strength of the arms that held him stationary.
“Not just them but the very Empire. Have you not been listening?”
“But our power binds minds to our will, surely—”
“Don’t play the fool, Enk. You know that there are things that can resist our power. Besides, the Worships that the Lord-Inquisitors are partnered with have the ability to sense when we use our power, not to mention their ability to bend fate to their whims.”
Enk lowered his gaze. “I see. The murders. The riots. It’s all one giant trap. You lured the Lord-Inquisitor and the Guardians of the Flame to Dilgan.”
“They would have found me eventually wherever I fled.”
“Why involve me? Why-why murder Merka?”
“I told you I felt your ascendance,” Tizkar said, crouching until he and Enk were at eye level. “That much is true. I was drawn to you like a moth to a bonfire. I found you that very night, crept upon you with thoughts of murder, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Enk clenched his jaw. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
“Done.” The Black Lion stood, cracked his back and sighed.
“Ah, finally,” Tizkar said, rising, turning away from his captive.
“I wish you had killed me,” Enk hissed, “perhaps then Merka would still be alive.”
The azure-haired boy paused, stroked his locket. “You’re not the good guy here, Enk.”
“And you are?”
Tizkar shook his head, chucked a sad chuckle.
“No one knows from where our power comes from,” the young man said, “or why it picks who it does, but there is a pattern. It always chooses the worse possible candidates, the most broken and ruined young males. Look at you. Would you willingly give someone like you such power? Someone who’s too much of a coward to face his enemies in person. Someone so morally bankrupt that they go to war wearing the body of their only friend?”
“If-if I’m so corrupt. . . ?” Enk choked upon a sob, balled his hands into fists. “Why! Why didn’t you kill me when you first had the chance? Why go through this elaborate scheme?”
“Your pain, your rage, your hate. . . . You reminded me of myself. A little push was all that was needed. Your mother had—
“Don’t mention her!”
Tizkar gave a wry smile. “Did you ever read her mind? No, you wouldn’t, would you?”
“Shut up.”
“Do you ever wish you never told your father what you saw?”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“What kind of woman beds her own brother?”
“SHUT UP!”
The past bent into gleaming hooks, wrenched Enk’s muscles like bowstrings. Red rage flared. He threw himself forward, bore the Peacebringers holding him over his bent back. They crashed to the ground, air bursting from their gulping mouths. Tizkar was dancing back, his unsheathed blade agleam for watery brilliance.
“Stop him!” someone was bellowing. “Take aim—!”
Enk scooped up his discarded sword, slashed it upward even as he stood. His boots skidded on sand, yet he managed to maintain his balance. A dozen Peacebringers lowered bayonet-tipped muskets in his direction. He froze, heard the thud of a human heart climb above the thrashing sum of the world.
“Noo!” Tizkar howled at the lawmen. “Leave him to me.”
The young scion shifted his stance. He felt no fear, only anger for the onerous toil already exacted.
Tizkar beckoned him forth. “Come, show me who’s rage burns hotter, who’s hate runs deeper.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Enk cried. “You’re a monster!” His voice cracked the back of his throat, such was his furor.
He strode toward the other boy as if he were little more than kindling, just something else to be burned. Hatred soaked the fiber of his being, rendered him indomitable. He watched the murderous glint of Tizkar’s eyes, ignored the twirling skip of his blade, then the only space that existed between them was torment-tipped and brutality-edged.
Paroxysms of movement and sound, naked blades and clacking air, kissed by wavering light. Clangs too light, too quick to be hammer blows, swords careening through infinitesimal intervals, smashing sharp edges with metal surfaces.
Enk retreated from the violence of Tizkar’s attacks, his wrists aching from parrying the clanking strikes. With a kind of numb wonder he realized that the young man was far more skilled with the blade than their joint battle against the Black Lion had led him to believe.
Tizkar was well-trained. He swept and swung his sword, brought it round on a hissing hack. The young scion ceded another step, loosed a surprised cry as his boot came down on a bloody marking etched into the ground. Paralysis braided his thigh.
Time lugged, slowed as the Tizkar lunged. . . .
The future bloomed dark and festering in Enk’s mind’s eye.
An image of Ilima’s bloated corpse, gnawed upon by vermilion-eyed rats.
NO!
Enk’s cry of pain transformed into an enraged howl. He whirled, swatting away Tizkar’s blade. He hurled himself at the other boy, fighting the way he always envisioned he could. As nimble as a feather, as relentless as the tide, he pursued Merka’s murderer, wracking and battering aside attacks with strikes more vivid for the glare of complex geometries reached.
Tizkar floundered, unable to pierce the mathematic truths glimpsed.
The young scion’s sword-point glittered as it fell, only to reverse at an odd angle and disappear into the azure-haired boy’s shoulder.
Howling, Tizkar threw himself back, rolled across the ground, his eyes wide, his face a mix of shock and horror. Splotches of red and a blue wig marked the spot he once stood. But Enk did not hesitate, he followed Tizkar even as he fled, kicking up billowing granules, sword swinging upon a pendulum that would both blot and cleave.
“No!” Tizkar cried, flopping to a halt before an intricate design in the sand. “Stop!”
Enk roared, rented the air with glorious hatred, cast his blade downward on a murderous slash.
He blinked.
Glimpsed movement from the corner of his eye, a dark forearm reaching around to wrap about his neck. . . .
Felt cold iron pierce his back, a dagger violating his kidney as a womb.
Saw the sword slip from his numb fingers, plunge into the ground next to Tizkar’s face.
The forearm tightened about his throat.
The force yanked him backward.
He tripped over his own limbs, dropped to the earth, snarling for failing when victory was so close.
Chapter Forty-One
The Sacrifice
Enk did not so much struggle against the one that held him ensnared, as become a collection of violent reflexes, gasping, clawing, blind to all but the forearm that constricted and the dagger that kept him riven. The Black Lion loomed behind him, impervious and immovable despite the bloody grooves scratched into his skin. Sounds both near and far, air hissing from parted lips, chains rattling, muffled voices shrieking.
“That was an impressive display,” Tizkar said, climbing to his feet with an uneasy laugh. He disappeared behind Enk, reappeared donning a blue wig. “But I was never one for a fair fight. I like winning too much.”
The young scion wheezed, unable to form words, unable to speak. His eyelids fluttered, slid toward oblivion. Then there was the briefest of easings, a relaxing of the knotted muscles about his neck. He inhaled roughly, desperate for air. His chest contorted about thunderous reverberations.
“Tizkar!” a young girl’s voice rose behind him, then fractured into a collection of chirping echoes.
Enk jerked against another’s unconquerable might, his eyes questing, saw a little girl in a white dress—Cat. She dropped the Peacebringer’s hand who was guiding her out of the tunnel, raced toward Tizkar, her wild tangle of curls, now bound into braids that skipped in the air behind her. Not even the arm she had in a sling seemed to temper her glee at the s
ight of Tizkar. Ugly barked and scratched at the tunnel floor, but refused to follow his mistress onto the sand.
Tizkar met her halfway, gathered her in his arms, spun her in dizzying loops. A carillon of girlish giggles, piping sweet as much for their author’s unblemished innocence as the sense of approaching doom.
“Run—!” Enk croaked, only to sputter as the Black Lion’s forearm flexed.
“Who’s that?” Cat asked. Her eyes flitted from Tizkar to Enk and back again, all without lingering upon the captives or the gory composition painted into the sand.
The sound of laughter faded, died as the last golden fragment waned.
“Nobody important,” Tizkar said, kissing her cheek.
Cat tilted her head, revealing she held no inkling of what was yet to happen.
Sacrifice. Always the innocent had to be sacrificed.
No-no-no-no!
Enk choked, sensed tears spill from his closed eyes, sensed moisture slip down his borrowed face.
Not her too!
“Is he another bad person?” he heard her ask.
He felt the heat leak out of him through his wound, felt his unseen light continue to dim. A fleeting span where he was allowed to breathe.
He opened his eyes, gulped.
Tizkar now sat on the chair with Cat perched on his knee, fumbling at his coat pocket. “Do you want a candy?” he asked her.
She gave a giddy little bounce in lieu of a response.
Tizkar chuckled, slipped a green sweet into her little hand. “Now what do you say?”
“Thank you, Tizkar.” Cat snuggled closer, swayed her dainty feet. “When is auntie coming back?”
“You’ll get to see her soon.”
“Promise?”
“I . . . promise.”
Tizkar met Enk’s eye then, a shard of hopelessness darkening his brow. He threw an arm around the six-year-old, squeezed her tiny shoulder. She nippled at the end of the candy, none the wiser.
He cleared his throat, looked past Enk. “Where were we?”
Suni strode past Enk’s kneeling and panting form, appearing from somewhere behind the Black Lion. The man’s bald skull was awash with amethyst and periwinkle for the flicker and glint of his hellish tattoo.
“Watch closely,” the Black Lion hissed into Enk’s ear, tugging on the dagger he held within the young scion.
Enk groaned, but not because of the pain—or not solely—it was the Clansman’s voice, so different than it had been only minutes earlier, as if someone else now spoke through his lips. Someone more cultured, more learned. Someone he had heard once before, perhaps?
But before he could ponder this new complication, Suni’s glittering tattoo waxed brighter, turned into an aberration that crawled along his skin, prodding and poking at the very limits of the world.
A profound sense of wrongness pried at Enk’s heart, tore it open with the last blinding flare of orchid light. Fear, the scratching, clawing kind. The sound of whimpering, then gentle shushing.
“It’s all right, Cat,” he heard Tizkar whisper in a voice that held otherworldly power. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, not here.”
Enk blinked, gazed appalled at what a Warlock’s dark sorcery had wrought.
An infernal monster stood where Suni once stood—an eyeball shaped horror the size of a boulder, furnished with a pair of vomit-colored wings and six insect-like limbs, each talon-tipped.
The creature that was Suni flapped its hideous wings, kicked up plumes of glistening sand, rose into the air on a lurching skip.
Enk flung himself back in terror, but the Black Lion rode the circumference of his passion, kept him impotent in his unflinching grip, all while chuckling derisively in his pounding ear.
“Love is a weakness and. . . .” Tizkar murmured, petting Cat’s shoulder as his gray eyes watched Suni whirl about the lamps dangling from the ceiling. “And there’s only one way to be free of it.”
“Don’t do this,” Enk said, gasping past the arm choking him. “If there must be a sacrifice, sacrifice me!”
Tizkar blinked, lowered his gaze to study Enk anew. “You offer me the life of your friend? Something that is already mine?”
“No! I offer myself. I will come here in person and surrender myself to you.”
“You would sacrifice yourself for her. Why?”
The Black Lion growled in Enk’s ear, squeezed. Enk gulped, wheezed, but the hesitation he saw in Tizkar’s eyes gave him the strength to push on, to fight through the lack of wind.
“She’s a child,” he hissed. “An innocent child.”
“Yes, but no one stays innocent forever.” Tizkar pressed his lips to the back of Cat’s head, his eyes luminous with unshed tears. “Everyone grows up. Everyone betrays.”
“Tizkar. . . .” Cat shifted on the azure-haired boy’s lap, scooped moisture from his cheek. “You’re crying. What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
The young man’s lips trembled.
Cat looked longly at her half-eaten sweet, shook her head, then held it up to Tizkar with a smile. “Here. You can have the rest of this. Sometimes I feel sad, too . . . when I miss mommy, but candy always makes it all better.”
“I can’t do this,” Tizkar wheezed. He clutched Cat close, the network of flesh sheathing his face contracting into an emblem of dismay.
“You have to,” the Black Lion howled, strangling Enk. “It’s the only way.”
A choking sob. “I know but—”
“Remember your sister!”
“My-my sister. . . .” Tizkar’s head snapped up and his tremors stilled. “Yes, I must remember the indignities suffered in her name.”
Cat squeaked in his arms, her eyes coat button round.
“Out on the streets,” Tizkar continued, “hunger makes whores out of all orphans before long, but I would be damned if I allowed my little sister to become a common one. Better she become a Devotee of the Holy Harlots, I thought. Better a whore to the divine. So I plotted and schemed to make her one, only for her to betray me in the end. After all I had done. After all I had suffered.”
Enk thrashed, writhed against the Clansman. There had to be a way to prevent this, a way to cut through Tizkar’s hurt and make him see the lunatic dimensions of this path.
“Like a fool, I ran to her when I discovered my power,” Tizkar was saying. “I thought she would be proud and happy. She was neither. My power terrified her, though she tried to hide it. I didn’t understand why, so I read her mind. I wish I hadn’t.”
Enk’s hands dropped from the Black Lion’s forearm, flopped by his side.
There had to be a way. . . .
His vision dimmed as his eyes burned for the searing light of cataclysmic enormities shorn from the surface of a living flame. And he was a petrified boy, gazing slack jawed up at the sparkle and gleam of burning debris, flaking from the breast of a hanging inferno. . . .
A glimpse into the recent past. . . .
“C-Cat. . . .” Lulu’s remembered whisper cawed. “Tizkar’s daughter. . . . He . . . Doesn—”
Enk’s eyes jumped open upon an in-breath so shrill it sounded like an inverted squeal. He was a black-and-gold kite, riding the twist and veer of summer winds, gliding across golden fields, full with the vigor of renewed hope.
“That’s when I learned of Mindrippers and the Churches war against them,” he heard Tizkar say. “My sweet little Nane meant to betray me to her higher-ups, meant to have me killed for what I am. That’s what my years of love and devotion got me. My own sister!”
Enk tried to speak, but his voice came out as a trilling little rasp.
“All I could do was remember all those times I was defiled. All the nights I returned home with food to quiet her stomach rumblings. The way her greedy little mouth devoured all that my suffering had earned, the way she never asked how I. . . . The way her belly stretched with sustenance while mine remained empty.”
Enk flung his head back against the Black Lion’s chest, once, twice. . . .
Above, Suni clicked his talons in an odd rhythm.
“I didn’t mean to, not at first,” Tizkar cried as he wrapped his hands about Cat’s throat. She turned toward him, her expression a mixture of trust and confusion. He pressed his head to her forehead, squeezed. “But by the third time my dagger entered her. . . .”
Yes,” the Black Lion hissed.
Cat raised a frantic hand in defense, her lips glossy with rivets of green candy. She made small choking sounds as the sweet tumbled from her groping fingers. Suni’s wordless song whipped the air, haunting, as if his talons were children crying out from the bars of a dark cage.
No-no!
Suddenly Enk was a little boy, one forced to watch the burning of a beloved pet by a vengeful mother. Suddenly he was fighting against restrains, biting and clawing until he became something immense and bent, a voice pouring out of a bottomless aperture, mewling and enraged.
“STOP! SHE’S YOUR DAUGHTER!”
Tizkar looked past Cat’s thrashing fits, looked to him, the scion of House Gueye, with eyes steeped in horror. “I know,” he sobbed.
The crack and pop of delicate bones, sounds that heralded the end of the child’s cringing struggles.
“No,” Enk whimpered, going limp in the Black Lion’s furious embrace. Sorrow swam as blistering moisture across his eyes.
Tizkar clutched the girl’s corpse to his breast, buried his face into the nape of her broken neck, loosed a keening shriek. Light boiled from him, a black light that lashed and stung for the simple glimpse of it, heartache made manifest as an otherworldly radiance.
Suni cartwheeled above, clanking talons, riding the updrafts of nascent damnation. And Enk felt it, the approach of the Hundred Hells, a dimple in what he should not be able to perceive, a seething absence that rose from below to grope and prod at a ground steeped in death and suffering.
The lamps died upon a noxious gust.
Darkness swelled, only to retreat as geysers of purple incandescence sputtered up from the feet of the bound captives. They wailed and kicked and shrieked, bathed in ethereal flames that left them unburned. Around them, the designs inked into the sand boiled and hissed like flowing magma, spat scarlet bubbles into the air—bubbles that contorted with the faces of leering abominations.
Mindripper Page 28
