Flesh and Bone

by Robin Lythgoe

  “I will keep him precisely because I do love him.” Bairith paced the circle, stepping just outside the runes. As he walked, he chanted in a strange, harsh tongue. The swirling smoke caressed his limbs, swaying behind him.

  Sherakai’s chest tightened. His hands turned to ice even as great drops of sweat dripped down his face. The room tilted. For a moment he made out a pair of brilliant silver eyes peering at him through the vapors. Huge. The creature that bore them must have its head on the floor.

  The rakeshi screamed again and again. Tameko shouted words that made no sense. Sherakai tilted sideways, impossibly dizzy as he saw the beast disintegrate, bit by bit, into a viscous cloud. He darted a glance toward the monster hidden in the smoke, but it was gone. With a voice of thunder, Bairith commanded the cloud into a funnel shape. It moved across the room then the icy tip touched Sherakai’s left temple.

  Everything split into a blinding kaleidoscope of sensation and emotion: light and shadow, sound, smell, taste. Cold and incredible pressure threatened to break his skull into pieces. It seeped into his core, filling him inch by inch. He prayed it would stop. The binding ropes kept Sherakai upright, but couldn’t prevent head-over-heels shock as the essence of the demon was forced inside him. Such agony! Such rage!

  The onslaught shattered any hope of capturing the pain and using it. A protest rose within him, only to be swept away by something greater still. It dragged him in a wild hunt through shadows limned with violet, searching for a way out, a way through. Razor claws tore at walls made of twilight and strong as iron. It spun circles, dashing vainly this way and that.

  Beneath the rise and fall of its howl came another memory. Sherakai remembered being bound in place—this place—with a different view of the chamber. A view upwards through streamers of smoke. A presence nearby, too large to comprehend. Scales? Silver eyes as big as his hand.

  The caged creature howled, and the image evaporated. The room appeared now as shadows with flashes of blinding white. Sherakai’s view switched indiscriminately and violently between the physical and the internal. He could find no anchor, no balance. The purple chaos continued to thread through everything he saw or he felt.

  There had been another cloud funnel, he was sure, but rising from the center of the rune circle. Rich copper, not violet. The scent of spice, not ash. The flavor of blood and a sense of immensity. When? Surely he would remember such an awful thing!

  A rush of wind preceded a deafening crack! and Sherakai’s entire world lurched sideways. He hung suspended in nothingness for an eternity, then all at once he could see and hear again. It was as if from a distance, as if he were there, but… not. Some force threw his body against the restricting ropes again and again. It growled through his throat, straining toward freedom.

  Stop, Sherakai begged, please stop.

  He lunged again. Without warning, the restraints fell away, and he was unbound. Momentum carried him forward, but the lack of proper limbs felled him. Anger propelled him upright again. Before him he made out a man, struggling as if caught in a trap, bound to the stone.

  A stinking, foul creature.

  No. Papa!

  Unadulterated hatred burned through his veins, seared every muscle.

  No! I love him. NO!

  The man’s eyes closed and his mouth moved. The words hung just beyond understanding.

  Frantic with terror, Sherakai fought to bank the awful rage burning in him. To save his father.

  Blind and deaf to any but its own need, the beast inside leaped toward its quarry. Unwieldy as this body might be, its poor claws and nearly useless teeth functioned well enough to claim brutal, ruthless vengeance.

  Chapter 36

  The days that followed were filled with equal portions of rage, pain, confusion, and shock. Sherakai’s memory betrayed him. His arrival in the Heart and the spell itself became uncertain things, wisps hiding behind the breadth and depth of those memories he could not forget. Like demons, they ripped him apart every day: he had killed his father. At the mage’s command, the beast inside Sherakai took him over. From a remote place, he watched his papa die. It was his hands that murdered him. His mind bent around the recollection of drinking blood.

  New nightmares interspersed with old and shredded him. On the arena sands he fought a ghostly creature he could not defeat. Sometimes it bore the head of his decapitated brother. The jansu locked him in the Hole with the bodies of his murdered family and sealed the entrance because Sherakai refused to love him. The kathraul’en kept him alive for untold centuries.

  Fever chills wracked his body between horrors. Spasms convulsed his muscles, leaving him weak and deeply aching. Awareness tottered along two parallel paths. Both held implacable rage, but where one blazed hot and chaotic, the other smoldered. One feared, while the other nursed a seed of hope.

  He didn’t want either option. More than anything, he longed for stillness and silence, for the chance to remember who he was. He tried. Oh, how he tried… The price of failure was pain, not the simplicity of death. Could his agony last forever? If it did, would he lose his mind? If that were not terrifying enough, a tendril of memory teased him. It refused to solidify, but it would not leave him alone. He needed to do something, but what?

  He dreamed that Fesh and Teth stood beside him in the middle of a storm, waiting with expectation clear on their faces. They would not tell him why.

  Strange impressions crisscrossed with reality. Had he not been sick like this before? Been carried through the portal into the Twixt on a stretcher? The horizontal view was so familiar…

  He dreamed that the nameless woman from his youth sang to him. That she did her utmost to heal the great, gaping holes in his head and in his heart. Echoing her voice came another, deep as the sea. He could not understand the words of this second voice, but he thought they were important. He should recognize them.

  On another occasion, a slender figure stood across the width of a battlefield at the edge of a forest. Hardly more than a glimmer and a promise, he waited for Sherakai, patient, steadfast, and eager. Who could it be? The identity teased him but remained elusive.

  And then there was his father, over and over, screaming as Sherakai tore him apart.

  “Papaaaa!” The howl ripped ragged from his throat. The instinct to sit up or to roll away met with a counterforce that prevented escape. The rise and fall of chanting lifted him up and down like the swells on a lake. A more immediate noise came to him. A grunt? His? He couldn’t breathe.

  He flinched from a touch against his forehead, yet the contact brought hope. Even so, the lack of breath stole away any fledgling sense of calm. He could do nothing more than struggle with all his will to live.

  “Hush, my son, hush. Be still.” The Voice was too strong to disobey. He stilled.

  Sweet cicely tickled his senses. For the briefest moment, he could not place it, but he knew that scent better than any other, attached to it more memories and more emotion than one smell ought to hold.

  Bairith Mindar.

  The quiet chanting continued and magic twisted through him. Air rushed into his mouth, his nose, and suddenly he could breathe again. He sucked in a lungful. A dry throat and lingering terror set him to coughing. Hands stroked his arms as the murmuring persisted. Motes of energy prickled through him, awakening the old spell Lord Chiro and his mages had worked long ago. Yellow, then orange. Green, blue, white, and black were followed by incredible hues he could not name. Their beauty made him weep. So, too, did the more tangible movement of every thread of aro through his skin and bones, settling his spirit back into place within the confines of his body.

  A noise filled his ears. It reminded him of a wounded pig, screaming and grunting. This noise, though, carried garbled words. Begging words. Weak words.

  “Stop. Please stop. It hurts. Gods, please…”

  “Quiet, my sweet, all is well.” Bairith remained as calm as always, unaffected by the anguish of his beloved. The link was a sham. Bairith should experience every exc
ruciating agony Sherakai suffered. He didn’t so much as tremble as he stroked Sherakai’s sweat-dampened hair away from his brow then drew a symbol on his forehead. The tang of spices and blood scraped Sherakai’s sinuses. Moisture streamed from his eyes and his nose. “Breathe. Listen to my voice and breathe.”

  Could he stop the torment if he held his breath? He clamped his lips shut. A hand in his belly pushed the air out and Sherakai cried at his failure. After a time the colors paled, then eventually disappeared altogether. They did not leave him blind, but incredibly sensitive. The same went for his all senses. He could hear every scratch of thread-on-thread in the garments Bairith wore. Taste the biting flavor of spell components with every gasp. Feel the burn of smoke and anise in his nose and all the way down his throat. Could he smell with his skin? Bizarre. Even frightening… Nothing felt right. He choked back another cry, and Bairith cradled him against his chest.

  His fists curled in silk so fine it should have disintegrated in his grip. “What have you done to me?” he wept, face pressed into the jansu’s shoulder.

  “I have made you strong, my heart, so very strong.” He stroked Sherakai’s hair, musing. “I have made you so much more than you used to be.”

  “Why couldn’t you love me the way I was?”

  “I have always loved you; you know this. And I will love you even better now…”

  Chapter 37

  Recovery did not come easily this time. Senses so sharp they hurt distracted Sherakai whether he was at practice, walking down the corridor to his room, eating, or even sleeping. Blinding headaches struck him down without rhyme or reason. Nightmares shattered his rest to the point he did not want to sleep anymore. The jansu insisted he continue practicing. In fact, he sparred with Sherakai himself. He struggled through the familiar forms, failing to parry easy blows, falling often. The more his head ached, the more clumsily he responded.

  With deliberate patience, Bairith instructed him to get up. “Again,” he said. “Practice again and again until you absorb the rakeshi completely.”

  “What if the rakeshi absorbs me, instead?” It seemed a more likely outcome. He could not remember it happening, but the bleakstone collar had disappeared.

  “It will not.”

  “How can you know I won’t become half man, half demon like Fesh and Teth?”

  “Faith. Already you are more than they were.”

  Sherakai got to his feet for the thousandth time and picked up the staff he’d dropped.

  “Perseverance,” Bairith said, and his Voice lent strength to Sherakai’s flagging resolution.

  The jansu could use the link as well as ever. Sherakai could not. The magic tangled in such a knot he could make no sense of it. Bairith knocked him down as if Sherakai were no more than a sack of wool. This time he planted his staff in the sand and regarded his pupil with a cynical eye.

  “Have Tylond heal that cut. We’ll resume this afternoon.”

  Mage Tylond resented what he labeled a lack of cooperation in the healing process. He resented Sherakai himself. As usual, he showed it in little, mean ways that ranged from rough handling to painful magic, to contemptuous remarks.

  “You’re jealous.” Sherakai’s voice was not the same after Bairith fused the demon to him. It was deeper, rougher, harder to use. The healer deemed it unimportant but conceded that all the yelling Sherakai had done might have damaged his vocal cords. Even pressed by the jansu, he had no cure for that. Sherakai knew he lied.

  “Jealous?” Tylond echoed, mouth crinkling in disgust. The darkness of pain lingered around his empty eye socket, evidence that it had not been Healed properly. Good. “Hardly. You are nothing more than an irritation to me. His Lordship should have dealt with you the way he did your brothers. Instead, he’s chosen to ignore how you’re putting your hooks in him.”

  There seemed little point in correcting him. Sherakai was the one with a demon crammed into him. A demon constantly slamming against the restraints the jansu employed to control it. It succeeded in slipping its harness with alarming frequency…

  “You can stop looking at me like that,” Tylond snapped.

  Whatever his expression, if it perturbed the halfer, Sherakai would be happy to keep it. “Why?”

  “Still impudent, in spite of all the improvements we’ve made.” He emphasized his displeasure with the jagged use of his Gift. Shading. Healing what needed no repair.

  The muscles in Sherakai’s shoulder jumped reflexively in response; he did not. He didn’t measure pain as he once had. His perception of the room intensified, then eased again, but only a fraction. “I would be careful if I were you.”

  “Do you not trust the jansu’s bridle on your beast?”

  He didn’t trust anything Bairith said or did. A trail of dead sparring partners haunted him. He couldn’t even remember their names. “Do you?”

  For that, he received another jab of magical energy. The rakeshi lashed out, leaving Sherakai with the sensation of being in two places at once—and leaving Mage Tylond in a crumpled heap against the wall. He clutched his throat and gasped horribly.

  Flexing his hand, Sherakai slipped from his perch on the stool to crouch beside the halfer. “That was the beast, not me,” he explained, “though every time I see you I am tempted to do much worse.” He pulled Tylond’s eyepatch up to consider the disaster it hid.

  Tylond grabbed at his arm, his good eye wide with panic. “Help—” he wheezed.

  “You are a despicable, spiteful, feeble excuse for a living being. How does it feel to lie helpless at someone else’s mercy?” His thumb lightly caressed the remaining eye. “How about we remove this while you can’t defend yourself? It will be an improvement, you understand. For your own good.”

  The mage lurched helplessly. The gagging sounds he made reminded Sherakai of the stable hand he’d killed, except he felt not the slimmest shred of remorse now. That, rather than the shader, furrowed his brow.

  He patted Tylond’s cheek and stood. Under his skin, the rakeshi demanded freedom. A headache stabbed Sherakai’s skull and he put a hand to his temple. He couldn’t see—at least not as he normally did. Violent color overlaid everything. The mage throbbed with vivid life and he could smell the fear on him as thick and sweet as fresh meat.

  With a garbled cry, Tylond twisted that fear back on Sherakai.

  He retreated two steps, startled. Angry.

  Another surge struck him.

  It was exactly the wrong choice. The magic the healer cast broke against Sherakai, doused him, but did not drown him. The rakeshi bulled its way through the attack to destroy the source, heedless of anything but the need to eliminate the threat.

  When it was finished, when he crouched beside the body like a wild thing, he had neither satisfaction nor relief. It puzzled him in a remote, unsatisfactory way. Pressing a hand against the halfer’s still breast, he tipped his head to listen for the absent heartbeat. He’d lost something, and he could not figure out how or what.

  The jansu found him there soon after.

  “What is this? What have you done?”

  The rakeshi drew back, teeth bared, a rumble of warning in his throat.

  Bairith lifted a hand, palm out. “Stay.” His Voice pierced into the murk of wildness.

  He made a noise; not a whine, not quite a growl.

  As if he watched a dream unfolding, Sherakai cried out. Help me! Please… But Bairith did not hear him. Why not? What of the thrice-cursed link?

  The jansu gestured for him to stand and he did, swiftly, obediently—but not gladly. No, wary resentment prickled through him. Neither man nor beast liked the constraint of magic. Through the beast’s eyes, Sherakai saw the bond as a thin chain, indestructible and gleaming with a malevolent light. A slow pulse ran down it from Bairith to Sherakai—but not the other way around.

  The jansu grasped Sherakai’s jaw in one hand, his own elegant nose—perfect as the day they’d first met—lifted as he inspected his creation. “There you are,” he crooned. “An
unexpected development, but intriguing. How does it work, do you suppose?”

  He jerked his chin free but made no move to leave Bairith’s side.

  The mage smiled. “You don’t know what’s happened, do you? Putting the essence of a beast into a man causes physical changes. Sherakai’s beautiful green eyes will charm and beguile. These, though,” and he paused to explain. “These are black flecked with crimson, and they will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.”

  He had but one enemy, and that creature stood before him, unaffected by anything but admiration.

  “You scared Mage Tylond.”

  The beast’s gaze didn’t waver. Sherakai was happy not to look at the carnage he’d wreaked on the healer, though he wondered what Lord Chiro saw that made him say so.

  “Do you understand me?” He kept his voice low, non-threatening. Not that he ever needed to growl or shout to intimidate.

  Sherakai felt the muscles in his face curl into a snarl, but he could not make himself move, or speak, or strike out. Let go, he willed. Let me out!

  The beast swung his head back and forth, hissing through his teeth, hurting and confused.

  “Shh, shh.” The jansu gentled him as he would a skittish horse. “You are safe with me. You are a part of Sherakai now, and he is beloved to me. Hush. All is well. There is a bond between us. Feel it. Learn it. Trust it. Can you speak?” he inquired. Compelling magic underlaid the question.

  The rakeshi growled and shivered its hatred.

  Bairith smoothed the hair back from his temple, then combed his fingers through the ebony length. Over and over, soothing, hypnotic. “You must have a care with him. He is my heart and my hope, and you must always protect him,” Bairith went on, still soft, still tender. “I have never known such a love as this. Never believed such a thing could exist. It is a consuming devotion, and I revel in every marvelous moment.”

  Sherakai wanted to scream and spit in the jansu’s face, but his emotions didn’t affect the rakeshi in the least. Or did they? Had his anger at Tylond been what prompted the beast to action? If that were true, why didn’t it work now?