* * * * *
Sargon smiled in exultation when the communiqué ended. About time, his expression said. It had been five months, almost a year on Tiasenne, since the raid on Wysteirchan had gotten out of hand. Wysteirchan, the town Orashean had come from. Oh well, it hadn’t been too great a loss.
Five months? He realized suddenly that he still thought of time in Tiasennian terms, even after all these years.
Vaikyur-Erlenkov had re-appeared shortly after the city’s demise, only this time, the Tiasennians had been watching him so carefully that the spies couldn’t get close to him. His quarters had been moved inside the Headquarters building itself, quite an honor.
Sargon forced away the image of the twenty-second floor, quick recollections of the dining table, the worn spot on the floor where he sat to read his printvolumes, the airplane his mother had given him, his father’s boots lying on the floor...
I can’t let myself get sentimental, he told himself. But I do miss you, father. He had to stop, or in a moment she would become a part of his recollections, and he had no desire to lose self-control today.
Over the past five months, Vaikyur-Erlenkov had been building nine additional rescue ships, at least that was what the Tiasennian propaganda specialists were calling them, and it seemed they finally neared completion. Sargon had contemplated this information for the past two tendays, waiting for something interesting to be related to him.
And then he received a message that Ocver had finally succeeded somehow. Apparently, they were bringing Vaikyur-Erlenkov on board a cargo freighter that would be arriving in a few hours.
It took him only an hour to set up the interrogation room. The rest of the time he paced impatiently around Command Central, until Garen contacted him over the intercom to report that the cargo ship was docking in bay 1. Sargon didn’t wait to acknowledge him before he headed in that direction.
Ocver and his colleague supported the drugged man, who flopped along like a limp doll, by draping his arms about their shoulders.
He looks Orian, Sargon realized. It almost made him reconsider the interrogation procedure. Almost.
Eiron tried to blink away the fatigue from his eyes. “Who—” he let the question die, but his face betrayed his surprise as he came face to face with the Orian Great Leader—and a trace of recognition. Eiron had seen him before, in stills Alessia kept in a cubicle in her former chambers, but this man was no longer that human.
They gave Eiron another drug to counteract the sedatives. He was fully awake by the time he was taken to the interrogation room and conscious of the hostility of his environment. He rubbed the bruise on his head, a large, untreated gash where someone had clubbed him from behind as he was leaving Headquarters for a brief trip into the city.
How long had he been out? he wondered, but he had no way of knowing.
They threw him roughly into a chair, the hard-faced man with unflinching green eyes who looked more Tiasennian than Orian except for his darker skin, and his subordinate, a pale-skinned man with cream-colored hair who could pass for Tiasennian even better. Eiron wouldn’t have given them a second glance in Inen. That was, of course, what made them such effective spies.
“Well done, Ocver,” the Great Leader said, as the wiry, flint hard, green-eyed man strapped Eiron into the chair.
“Thank you sir,” he acknowledged stiffly, then withdrew to the wall and stood at attention.
Sargon gave Eiron no warning that the interrogation was about to begin. All of a sudden, Eiron felt like a hammer had fallen on his head, shattering his thoughts into fragments. He shivered with nausea, a pain so intense that he grew numb to the world. There was only pain. He thought he would steel himself against it, that somehow it would abate enough for him to reach out to the world again. Relief descended only when the force itself decided to retreat a little, acknowledging overkill.
The pain was still there, though, immobilizing him. Helplessly, Eiron sensed someone rifling through the broken images of his memory. He struggled in vain for several moments to push back the interloper, but his defeat was complete. His control simply snapped, now exposing the deepest recesses of his memory.
Sargon searched and searched, observing Eiron’s childhood, feeling Eiron’s isolation, remembering Eiron’s parents, living Eiron’s struggles within Tiasennian society.
He pulled away a moment to verify his own identity, trying hard not to be moved to pity. What he was doing was dangerous, he knew, even as he did it. There was a possibility that he wouldn’t be able to shake Eiron’s memories ever again, that another, false entity could gain some hold over his mind. But his will was strong against any other. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but see the similarity between himself and his captive.
It made him hate Eiron more. He didn’t want to identify with Eiron, to feel guilty for this violation.
So, Alessia had been hiding in the Northwestern Sea. Why hadn’t he thought of that? That explained what those confounded Classified Zones were all about. Dimly, Sargon knew that he was smiling somewhere in the present. He absorbed the story Alessia told Eiron, vexed. He remembered their shared past a little differently. For one thing, Orashean had deserved what he had coming to him! However, he was intrigued by Alessia’s dislike of Beren. So, his uncle had been a bad apple? he thought. Well, it was just as well that Sargon had kept the doctor from him when Beren’s breathing slowed...
Then suddenly there it was, the secret he had been hoping for, the secret that would give him the ultimate power he deserved. Kiel3 meant nothing to him, but the real singularity, Selesta’s great power, did. The plans were here, the plans he’d been denied. The artificial string, cosmic hole-creating engine plans. Alessia had given that knowledge to Eiron to build his defense ships, but Eiron had refused to use it. What an idiot, Sargon avowed in ugly triumph. What kind of fool would turn down a chance of obtaining absolute power?
Now he sifted for Alessia’s declaration of love for him. Instead, he came face to face with a horrific discovery.
So she loved Vaikyur-Erlenkov—this, this insignificant thing? Alessia had become attached to him?
He couldn’t bear it and withdrew from the pool of memories, his physical body also staggering back. Eiron’s face twisted in delirious pain. Then, as Sargon stared down at his rival, a horrible idea came to him.
This man had fulfilled his own dreams, had usurped his place, had stolen what rightfully belonged to him. In all his fantasies, Sargon had planned to forgive Alessia’s mistakes the day she came back to him, to forgive her for condemning him to an eternity as an undead creature. But now it seemed she could never be his, no—she loved this man instead! He couldn’t fathom the reality of it. She loved Eiron, and even if Eiron were to die, her love for him would survive on to eternity. It was more than unfair. It was incomprehensible. And it left him no other choice.
He fully intended to punish them both. But first—oh the depravity of it! There was something else he wanted more than anything, something his soul craved, and he knew he could have it. Yes, he could have her; he could attain what he wanted more than anything—vicariously.
She thought she had won? He laughed, anticipating his own conquest of Eiron’s mind. She thought she could reject him, escape him and get away with it? She thought she could keep herself from him forever when only the two of them would be there at the end of time?
He took a slight breath, then surrendered to the mindlink.
Retreating into his mind, only the power of his thoughts reaching out to Vaikyur-Erlenkov’s mind, Sargon forced away his own identity, and forced Eiron’s mind back, back under his advance. He was going to take Eiron’s place in those memories, to succumb to the full oblivion of a mindlink, to relive Eiron’s memories as if they were his own.
It was a dangerous thing to do, he knew, but he didn’t care. A small part of him protested, recalling stories Alessia had told him as a child about a man who had forgotten his own identity and lived a farce of multiple personalities, but from th
at Sargon had known it was possible—to completely absorb himself into another identity. It would be traumatic to return from those memories and discover that they were not really his. But he had to do it.
When the mindlink was over, Sargon’s own life and memory returned to him, pushing the other memories away, back into the recesses of his mind where they could only haunt him and bring no comfort or pleasure.
As he returned to the reality of his own life, a howl escaped his lips, a horrendous inhuman howl that echoed in the bare room. Ocver and his subordinate bristled under it, arms twitching at their sides.
What had suddenly happened? Only a second ago, the Great Leader had seemed triumphant, contemplative—and now... why was he in pain?
Meanwhile, Sargon looked down on his captive with new fury and suddenly knew what he wanted to do, what he would do. He wouldn’t kill Eiron. He didn’t know that the real reason he couldn’t was that Eiron’s memories had affected him more than he realized. They were there, lingering, still in his mind, gathering hold on him. To uproot them would have destroyed him—was this why that strange man Alessia had once spoken of had been tormented? Why he had developed a multi-personality effect?
Sargon forced Eiron’s invasive memories back, forced them down. No, he couldn’t kill Vaikyur-Erlenkov now. That wouldn’t solve or change anything. Yet he had something else in mind, something he hoped was worse. Something so simple. Deny his captive the same thing that had been denied him; yes, there was one way to kill Eiron’s love. He had only to erase Eiron’s memory. All of it. And then he could use Erlenkov against her.
Could there be any more just punishment than this?
“Come in here, Garen.” Sargon said in a level voice to the aide waiting outside the door. Garen trooped in proudly, a young, gangly man with long legs and a mismatched cherub face.
“Your orders, sir?” Garen said, eager-eyed, then waited.
“At ease, Garen. Wait a moment and you can escort Erlenkov to barracks.”
“Yes, sir.” Garen chirped, nodding, looking to the prisoner. If Garen wondered at the unorthodox orders, he gave no sign of it. The Great Leader was often as cryptic, but Garen was sure he knew what he was doing. Nevertheless, an unsettled expression fell over Garen’s face; a moment later he shrugged it off.
As usual, it had been easy to extract the necessary information from his unknowing aide, Sargon thought complacently. Then he turned to Eiron and began to reassemble the shards of broken memory into a new whole, before instructing Ocver to unbind the prisoner. A moment later Eiron came to, but he seemed still in a trance as, eyes closed, a low monotone escaped his lips.
“I am Orian. I serve the cause of the Great Leader Sargon because Tiasenne has abandoned us to die. I will do anything to serve him and save us, kill, and risk being killed for our people and their freedom...”
It took only a moment for the memory of Vaikyur-Erlenkov to die.
Even god cannot change the past.
—Aristotle
Chapter Twenty-One
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 70
