“God!” he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “That was the worst—” As recognition of his surroundings sunk in, he passed his eyes around the circle of his men. Eventually, they came to rest on Rai, who acknowledged him and then turned back to his subordinate.
“There,” he said. “Now, you keep yours.”
“Yes sir!” The young soldier saluted as the others helped their captain to his feet.
“What is the meaning of this?” the captain demanded. “What is going on?”
“Sir,” said the young soldier, “an agreement’s been reached. We have to go now.”
“Is he coming with?”
“No, sir.”
“Son, do you mean to tell me that you want me to defy a direct order from the king? Because let me tell you, that ain’t happening.” The troop gave Rai an apologetic look, which was answered with a shrug.
“With all due respect, sir,” said the man, “do you realize you were dead?” The commander’s brow furrowed intensely.
“What?” He looked between his secondary and the sorcerer. Rai nodded, as if to confirm the veracity of the statement. “That’s impossible.”
“No, sir. He brought you back to life on one condition, that we let him be.”
“Yeah?” This piece of information greatly reduced the remaining animosity that was separating Rai and the pilot captain. “Well, how do we know he won’t start using his powers for…whatever?” Rai rubbed his face.
“Sir, can we just…?” The young soldier took the captain by the arm and started to lead him toward the planes. “He can’t do that without the king anyway. Isn’t that where he got all the bodies? Besides, there’s no way we can fight him. If we make this into a war, every one of us is going to die. Think of it as cutting our losses.” His voice gradually faded. There looked to be no more real opposition from his boss, and presently, all eight planes were running and ready for takeoff. Rai watched them ascend in a vertical line from the places where they had landed, and he marveled briefly at the variance of technology in the world. Serberos himself refused to use anything more high-tech than a candle holder, and yet his army was kitted out with the best that he could get. It was, he thought, an accurate representation of the king’s priorities.
When the wind had died down from the aircraft, Rai knelt beside Iris’ body and placed his hand lightly on her forehead. Presently, her eyes opened. She gazed at him a moment, confused. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s okay.” Momentarily, she was relieved. Then a blast of anger rushed across her face. Before he could react, she had punched him in the jaw.
“You said you wouldn’t kill me!” she shouted. “You said—” Her throat became choked with tears and she had to stop. Rai touched her face and she slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Would you listen for a second of your life?” he asked affectionately. “I didn’t kill you. I knocked you out, and I’m sorry.”
“What?” She was staring at him like she hadn’t understood a thing he said. “But I was—” She fell silent. Then she said, “I’m an idiot.”
“You were just afraid.” He helped her sit up. “I wasn’t going to show you my magic.”
“I didn’t want to see it.” She reached up and touched the spot where her fist had collided with his face. “I’m sorry I hit you.”
“I was expecting it.”
Iris grinned. Sighing, she slumped down against his chest. “Can we go home now?”
“Where’s home?”
The girl looked at him with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. “I have to bring you home to my father. I promised him, didn’t I?”
“I’m not sure this is what he’s expecting.”
She laughed. “He’ll get over it.”
---
The news from the returning squadron of pilots was both incomprehensible and very bad. The necromancer had been cornered, but then lost. There was some sort of immense destruction. Inexplicably, the boy was dead. Steward Tarnslen tried his best to make sense of the report, but despite his diligence, the pieces refused to fit. He had the distinct feeling that there was something he hadn’t been told.
Making his way toward the throne room to deliver the dissatisfying conclusion, Tarnslen rehearsed the words in his head, which was something he did only rarely. But this was such a delicate matter that he knew he had to navigate carefully. If mishandled, the results would be disastrous.
He would soon find out that it no longer mattered.
As was customary, the steward knocked on the throne room doors. Unlike usual, he received no answer. A baseless feeling of dread spawned in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps the king is in his chambers, he thought, and it crossed his mind that he ought to check. Still, the throne room had always been Serberos’ favorite place; given the state of his mental health, it was unlikely that he would have left. Holding his breath, the steward reached out, putting his weight against the enormously heavy carved doors. They gave. It was not a good sign.
At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. None of the rich ornamentations were disturbed, none of the tapestries askew, none of the rugs rolled up at the corners. It wasn’t until he looked at the throne that Steward Tarnslen realized what was wrong.
Positioned between the arms of the throne, in the same place he had been for the past six days, was Serberos, King of Volikar. But even from his current distance, Tarnslen could tell that he was dead. Though his eyes were open, they had long since turned glassy, and the wrinkled skin of the old sovereign’s face was slack against his skull. In the middle of the throne aisle, Serberos’ chief steward, his most devoted servant, stopped.
He knelt.
He prayed.
---
Florien Deleone looked up from the newspaper as his daughter and the man she’d brought home instead of treasure entered the room. “Old King Serberos’ funeral is today,” he remarked, folding the paper and placing it on the coffee table. “Apparently it’s to be well-attended, to everyone’s great surprise.” He shook his head. “Always easier to show respect when you don’t have to look them in the eyes.”
“What does it say about Rai?” Iris asked. Rai winced a little.
“It says that the Volkari necromancer disappeared in a mysterious incident and has not been found. There is some speculation that he never existed to begin with.” Mr. Deleone smiled his charming salesman’s smile. “Sounds like you beat the system, my boy.”
“I hope so,” Rai said. Iris kissed his shoulder.
“If not,” the auctioneer continued, “we can always sell you and have you shipped somewhere else.”
“Daddy,” said Iris sternly. “I don’t want to sell him. I found him.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t buy him, sweetheart.” His daughter rolled her eyes.
“Let’s go out to the garden,” she suggested sweetly, taking Rai by the arm and shooting her father a look. They stepped through the back doors of the kitchen, into the pleasant shade of the veranda. Iris did not miss the blistering cold of Volikar, nor did she long for the sight of snow. She sat down on the heavily cushioned porch swing, rocking it with the balls of her bare feet. Rai sat beside her, his arm across the back. “I still can’t believe you let me dig those bullets out,” she said conversationally.
He glanced at her. “I still can’t believe you wanted to.”
She scoffed. “Like I would have left them in there. They might have poisoned you.”
“I doubt that very much.”
She turned so that her back was against his shoulder and swung her feet up onto the bench. The ropes creaked softly. Rai kissed the part in her hair. It was hard to believe that she’d been facing down death just a matter of days ago. How quickly the pace of her life had changed. One day she was a wanted fugitive, the next she was back to her indulgent lifestyle, lying in porch swings in the shade.
Only now, she had Rai with her.
She arched her back against his shoulder. “Do you like life in the real world?”
“Would it be better if we were kissing?”
That made him smile. “Come here and see,” he said.
Epilogue
Long after the age of Iris Deleone had passed, legends of Rai lived on, and in them, Iris did as well. Sometimes he would leave his apartment and go down to one of the city’s many bars, just to overhear someone’s drunken rendition of his life story. It was always a little different; Iris fell from the tower window, Iris had tried to break his neck and kill him. The couple who picked them up on the highway had as many different faces as they had names—they were gypsies, or bandits, or a roving team of bounty hunters who’d gone in pursuit of Iris and Rai after discovering their identities. Truthfully, the facts themselves hardly mattered to him. He mostly just wanted to hear her name.
Once upon a time, when they had first met, he and Iris had discussed the ravages of time. He was immune to them; she was not. But he loved her with an intensity that surpassed the number of years she lived, and the strange ageless quality of his features made it so that he seemed to conform to however old she happened to be. This is how they followed each other through life, bound forever by things that had happened when both of them considered themselves young. The years marched on, whitening her hair and thinning her slender frame. The crow’s feet at the corners of her sea-colored eyes were deep with laughter, her hands as soft as the first time he touched them. Yes, he had loved her fiercely, as much as he was able, and more. He had cared for her more than he thought could be possible.
But he could not share his immortality. Near the end of her life, she had asked him to promise that after she was gone, he’d find another love. “I won’t,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she answered. “You’re gonna live until the end of time. You can’t do it alone if you want to be happy.”
“I could have before I met you,” he said.
She’d given him that wry smile that, by then, was as familiar to him as daylight. “Well, you’re welcome.”
He hadn’t despised King Serberos since the day he left the castle, but on the day he laid Iris to rest, Rai had hated him with a passion. It was Serberos who denied him the privilege of following Iris to the grave, who kept him from perhaps seeing her again one day. After she was interred, Rai had gone home to their incredibly large, incredibly empty mansion, stepped into the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. He had looked absolutely miserable, but other than that, nothing had changed, not a single thing in the past sixty years. His hair was still thick and black and unruly, his face smooth and unlined. Iris was the one who was always shifting; in her own transformations, she had altered him. She had been the sole dynamic presence in his life. Without her, he felt lost.
He had never been able to conceive, and even if he had, she’d never wanted children, so once she was gone, he was on his own again. She’d willed her father’s auction business—now worth an impossible fortune—to him, and he sold it and took himself and the money back to a place where once he said he’d never show his face again, because it reminded him of her. Six years after the death of the man who was now being called “The Great Tyrant,” Olyn might as well have been an entirely different city. The roads had been repaved, buildings repainted. There were actual cars instead of fancy boxed carriages. The lot in which he had made his last stand had been covered over by a towering high rise with a multitude of glass windows that lit up like torches at sunrise. The only thing that remained of the Olyn he had wandered with her so long ago was the transit station, which still sat buried underneath a mall. Often, he’d walk by just to see it and be reassured that the past wasn’t all just a dream.
He took an apartment near the top of a skyscraper in the heart of downtown. Selling Florien Deleone’s auction houses had afforded him an amount of leisure time that was frankly ludicrous, but that’s what he wanted. He couldn’t heal the way he knew Iris would have wanted. Never had he even tried to imagine a life without her, and now that he was living one, it hurt.
He was not used to hurting. In her endlessly loving way, Iris had taught him to develop the same sort of needs that normal people had. She’d shown him how to make love, and he’d honestly wondered if he would really have gone an eternity without knowing that kind of pleasure. Gradually, he began to fall asleep every night with her, just for the surprise of waking up beside her in the morning.
Alone in his Olyn apartment, it wasn’t the same. When things were silent in the deep middle of night, he could hear the soft rush of traffic forty floors below. He spent a lot of the first nights there standing at the balcony rail and looking down at the stream of lights, mesmerized. It made him stop thinking about her.
Though at first he might have tried if he thought he had the chance, he couldn’t stop time from flowing onward, and his memories of Iris faded gently into the background of his mind, blending in with sketches from his childhood. At the time that he took up chess in the park, she was like an old and delicate scar—he could still feel the wound, but only if he touched it. More often than not, he didn’t think of her at all as he sat in the chair before his pieces, contemplating his next move.
Rai had become enamored of chess completely by accident. As the pain of his loss grew less and less, he went out more, though rarely to socialize. He preferred to spend his time walking, viewing the city in which he lived, and where his memories had taken hold. It was different every day. There were new people, new cars, new colors, new sounds. He was able to feel like he was living in a different world. If I could do this every day, maybe eternity wouldn’t be so bad. And how many cities in the universe were there? It was strange to say, but he was daring to think that immortality wasn’t as heavy a curse as he had made it out to be. Sometimes the pain was devastating, but time healed it, as time took care of everything.
These walks would often lead him to Idris Park, a vast expanse of green that hadn’t been there when he was “young.” When Olyn was overhauled by the new republic after Serberos hadn’t left an heir, some committee had made use of the dead space in the relative center of the city by planting a lot of trees and grass. There was a lake there too, perfectly round, that doubled as a skating rink during the long, cold winters. At any given day, in any season, he happened upon strangers of all ages there. He liked a lot of things about the park, but his favorite by far was the chessboards.
There were ten of them, placed neatly in rows of five along either side of the square courtyard which housed the fountain donated by the Museum of Mythology some thirty years prior. If he sat at the board in the far left-hand corner, he had a perfect view of everyone who walked by the fountain, but he was obscured by the pegasus spitting great feathered plumes of water. This was useful at the start, when he had no idea how to play chess, and didn’t really want anyone to see how poorly his games always went. But then he took a trip to the library, picked up a book of chess games, and began to read.
After the first chapter, he realized that it was just like war.
For all the things that had slipped from his brain as water through a sieve, the images of his time serving under Serberos had stayed, no matter how fervently he desired them to go away. When he started sleeping, he found that he would dream of the grisly scenes more often than not, and would wake with the sounds of the dying ringing in his ears. It hurt him to give the horrid old king any credit whatsoever, but there was one thing he’d learned there at the castle: the art of war.
Rai had the dubious privilege of knowing Serberos before he got old and infirm, when his mind was still as sharp as the sword hanging from his belt. These were the times when the king led his army to battle himself, when he would strike out onto the bloodied field and help Rai unearth corpses with his own two hands. Brutal but savvy, Serberos often used those times
to pass kernels of wisdom down to the young necromancer, in the manner of a gruff father advising an adopted son. Thinking on it now, Rai couldn’t help but speculate on the possibility that he was supposed to be Serberos’ heir. Before he left, that is. How different things might have been if Iris hadn’t come through the window on that savage winter night, or if she hadn’t noticed the impressions of Serberos’ footprints in the dust.
Nonetheless, Serberos’ lessons on war were the one thing Rai ever took to heart from him, and he carried that knowledge all through to the present day, where he used it to become an impressively adept chess player. He was at the park so often that the other regulars came to recognize him as a fixture, and if he happened to skip a day, the next time they saw him, they’d ask where he was. And then he mastered the game so thoroughly that suddenly challengers would show up and sit down across from him out of nowhere. It is worth noting that he did not beat them all; he relished those losing games, because they all taught him something new. Every match ended with a handshake and a smile. In the park, Rai was known for his even temper and his good sportsmanship. He was a highly recommended opponent.
Of course, none of these acquaintances knew about the darkness of his past. He was careful not to discuss his background in too much detail, which could prove surprisingly difficult. The volume of his years was such that he often forgot how young strangers assumed him to be, and when he failed to curtail his experiences appropriately, he’d get strange looks. “How do you know about that?” they’d say.
And Rai would shrug embarrassedly and call himself a history buff, an excuse that generally went over pretty well. A few times, that line had led to an enthusiastic and always grossly inaccurate retelling of the things that had happened in “Old Olyn,” as the former city was called. Every time, he’d listen patiently. “Oh,” he’d say. “I never knew that,” and smile inwardly at his own dry cleverness.
The Man In The Wind Page 8
