Shadows and Light

by Cari Z

  Rafael went chill with sudden terror. It was a visceral reaction, one he couldn’t hold back. Not with her. Not after this. He realized then that, fundamentally, nothing had changed for him or in him. His years of anger and hatred and carefully planned revenge had all come to nothing. In the end, he was the same person he had always been—Xian’s. Utterly and completely. In the sanctity of his master’s attention, however it was being given to him, he was content. He could do anything, withstand anything, give anything to him. Myrtea would break Rafael just because without Xian there was no more reason for him to try, not even for himself. He waited listlessly for his master’s judgment, his erection wilting rapidly.

  “No.”

  Myrtea raised one thin, elegant eyebrow. “I would think you’d be glad to avoid the public humiliation of destroying your failure. Why advertise your imperfections? Give him to me and you’ll be spared all that. We needn’t even use his name.”

  “No.” Xian was implacable. “My tenure is already reduced to three days and I don’t mean to diminish it further. Leave.”

  “You are unreasonable.”

  “And you live in a fantasy world where the past can be changed and the future can be bargained with, and I don’t have time to waste with you there. Leave.”

  Her face couldn’t pale any further, but to say that Myrtea was angry would have been a gross injustice to her sudden rage. Her heavy eyelids lowered in a glower, and her lips thinned as she hissed, “Then he will be castrated before the council by my hand for your selfishness, disemboweled and led about on a leash of his own entrails before I put him out of his misery like the pathetic cur he is.

  “And as for you, beloved… Your house will be under continuous guard until he is turned over to me personally tomorrow evening. Any interference will result in your punishment as well, which will be a permanent maiming if I have anything to say about it.” She turned on her heel and stalked out. The door closed behind her, leaving Rafael trembling with a hundred chaotic emotions. Xian didn’t say anything, just squeezed the nape of Rafael’s neck and sighed before turning and releasing him abruptly. Rafael collapsed into his master’s arms and Xian laid him gently on the floor, carefully refastening his ankle cuffs before turning away.

  “No!” Reaching out was excruciating, but Rafael couldn’t help himself. “Don’t leave me again.”

  “I already promised I wouldn’t,” Xian reminded him gently. “Trust me.” He walked back over to the table and grabbed a small bowl, a large metal pitcher of water and several pieces of cloth, then came back and sat down beside Rafael. He filled the bowl with water and held it to his former apprentice’s lips. “Drink, pet. I know you’re thirsty.”

  Thirst abruptly won the battle over emotion in Rafael’s head, and he drank the water as fast as he could stand to until the bowl was empty. Xian set it aside and wet one of the cloths, then drew it slowly over Rafael’s cuts and bruises, some deep and weeping, some hardly more than a shadow. He lingered over his punctured side. “It’s not healing as fast as we need.” He brought his hand to his mouth and bit fast and hard into the palm of his hand. Blood pooled there, and he offered it to Rafael. “Drink.”

  Rafael shook his head. He didn’t want to heal, didn’t want anything to do with the blood of a High One now. Tomorrow would be bad enough without lengthening the amount of time he could endure it without dying.

  “Rafael, this may very well be the last time you ever taste my blood, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. Drink it and I’ll explain everything to you, but I need you whole for my plan to work.” Xian kept his hand there insistently. “Trust me.”

  He did. He couldn’t do anything else. He was Xian’s puppet, empty without his regard. Gods, he was pathetic. Rafael turned his head and licked up the small pool of blood. The sharp, metallic tang was like lightning in his stomach, and in less than a minute he felt his wounds closing. He pushed to his knees carefully, mindful of his restraints.

  “Better,” Xian said. He shook his head ruefully. “I played that last round poorly. I shouldn’t have provoked you in front of her, it tightened an already stringent schedule. I wanted to ease you into what I’m going to reveal to you, Rafael, but we don’t have the luxury of patience any longer.”

  “This was you being patient?” Rafael objected with a gesture down at himself.

  Xian smiled. “Of course. I told you the beatings were more for your sake than mine, and you can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself. It centered you. Focused you. You did very well.”

  Rafael cursed himself for feeling better with that approbation. “So what do you want to tell me then?” Fragments of memory rose up in his head. “Is this about what you said earlier? About the High Ones’ power waning?”

  “That’s part of it,” Xian said. “But not the most important part, not for me.” He made a ‘come on’ gesture with one hand. “Questions are acceptable, Rafael.”

  Faced as he was with a sudden flood of information, Rafael’s tongue grew heavy in his mouth. This was it. He was being offered the chance to know why he had been rejected, why he had been judged unfit to ascend, and the thought was paralyzing. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to marshal his thoughts. In the end, his first questions were inevitable. “Why didn’t you turn me? What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Xian replied immediately. “It was never your fault.”

  “But it must have been!” Rafael insisted angrily. “I presented myself at the Hall of Ascendance and they told me I was unfit! They threw me away and broke my legs when I tried to return to find you. You wouldn’t see me! Why?”

  “It was never your failure, pet, it was mine.” Xian’s face clearly expressed his pain, tension radiating from the corners of his pale, inert eyes. “I failed as your master, Rafael. I made you unable to obey another. From the first you were the perfect apprentice—eager, malleable, so willing to hang all your hopes on me, and I let you. I abused your trust. I took your faith and centered it on me, not on the council. I took your talents and honed them to my needs, not the needs of a future master. I took your love and welcomed it, rather than teaching you to bury it for duty’s sake. If I had come to you that night and given you the First Draught, given you to the council, you would have been brutally handicapped by my excesses with you. They would have tested you and found you wanting. So I lied to the council and they turned you out instead.”

  Rafael shook his head numbly. “I wish you had killed me instead. I tried to kill myself.”

  “I know.”

  “How could you know?”

  Xian folded his legs more comfortably. “I followed you for days, Rafael. I watched you try to kill yourself over and over again. I stayed close to you and bled for you when you needed it, until you found your feet.”

  “Until Feysal found me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the reason I kept healing.”

  “Yes, pet.”

  Rafael shook his head again. It was too much to take in. “What was the test? That I would have failed?”

  “The same test all my apprentices are given,” Xian said regretfully. “To kill me.”

  Rafael was shocked. “That— Why would the council do that? It makes no sense! It would be a ridiculous waste of your life if someone was to succeed, and when they failed… Failure always means death.”

  “Not in this case. It’s the only exception to the rule, and not one we can discuss beforehand. The test proves that your loyalty is to the High Ones as a people, to the Upper City as a whole, rather than to me. You lived in hell for five years, hating me for what I did to you, and even then you couldn’t drive yourself to kill me when the opportunity came.”

  “I tried!” Rafael insisted. “I truly tried, I wanted to kill you. I was close…” The memory of it made him feel sick and he averted his eyes.

  “I know. Close, after five years of abandonment. What could you have done before that, fresh from your apprenticeship, proud and eager to please me? Could you
have done that test justice, or would it have been clear to the council that I had made an unforgiveable mistake with you?”

  Rafael sighed. “No. I couldn’t.” He knew it for the truth, ugly and bitter though it was. The stinging in his thighs eased to the point where he could kneel comfortably and he sat back, his hands resting on his filthy, blood-soaked trousers.

  “And here we are today.” Xian shook his head. “Only with something as vicious and volatile as love could I ever break you, Rafael. You always exceeded my expectations as an apprentice, but my understanding of the depth of your attachment came too late for me to do anything about it but accept it.”

  Rafael felt wrung out by his master’s confessions. So much of his painful past was clarified, but it was a cold comfort. He was exhausted, he hurt and his heart felt like it was going to shatter anew. There were still questions to be asked, however. “What is Myrtea so afraid of?”

  “Many things,” Xian replied. “Things she hasn’t had to fear for hundreds of years. Old age, sickness, death…the specter of her own mortality.”

  “High Ones are immortal.”

  “As long as the source of our immortality continues to flow, yes.”

  Rafael’s head jerked up in shock. “The source is drying up?”

  “The flow has been steadily diminishing for the past decade. At first our wizards thought the conduit to Erran was being blocked by something simple, a change in the earth below Clare, something that could be blasted free with magic. Now a simpler and more final truth has become apparent. Erran is dying. The gods are giving their son the freedom he rejected so long ago, and when he loses his immortality, we all do.”

  “Fucking hell.” Rafael was dumbfounded. “Bloody fucking hell.”

  “Succinct as ever, pet.”

  “What… What will happen here?”

  “You tell me.” Xian stretched his legs out in front of himself, his bloodstained toes gleaming darkly in the torchlight. “Assess the situation.”

  It was like being in the classroom again. Rafael stared at his master’s bare feet and contemplated the unthinkable, speaking his conclusions aloud as he worked the problem through. “There will be…hoarding. Infighting as the High Ones struggle to preserve themselves for as long as possible. Assassins will be very busy. The council members will move to protect themselves at all costs.” He lifted his head. “There aren’t going to be any more ascendances. The council can’t afford to make more High Ones.”

  “Entirely accurate.”

  “The Lower Half will get suspicious when no more of them are inducted into the ranks.”

  “They’re already growing restless,” Xian affirmed. “Your killing of our chairman’s major-domo to draw me out delayed the inevitable, but the fact is that he would never have been given the First Draught. Our servants know that something is wrong, and it’s a matter of months or weeks until they discover what. Some may already know.”

  A comment Daeva had made to him earlier, about rivaling the power of the High Ones and nothing lasting forever… Could he know? If anyone among the Lower Half did, it would be Daeva. “Some may,” Rafael agreed.

  “And once the Lower Half realizes our plight?”

  “There will be anarchy.” Scenarios whirled through Rafael’s mind. “You’re outnumbered. There will be fighting, slow at first but it will gain speed as the panic spreads. You can’t win over the long term.”

  “Over the long term, pet, Clare will cease to exist.”

  “What? How?”

  “Clare is a city that lives on the sufferance of magic, Rafael. In order to make it great, extreme things were done. You’ve traversed the dead zone, you know how fragile the ground beneath our feet is. Clare was built on the strength of our wizards’ spells, not a solid foundation of earth. We tunneled rampantly in an effort to find more wellsprings early on, and that greed is going to sink this city, quite literally.”

  “When?” Rafael breathed. His mind was working overtime now, casting up visions of entire city blocks crumbling and falling immeasurable distances, carrying thousands of screaming people with them. How would anyone survive? Feysal and Mina… “Damn it, when?”

  “No one is certain,” Xian said quietly. “The magic holding up this city is ancient and still very strong. It could be decades before the collapse, but Clare will collapse eventually. That’s not the council’s greatest concern right now.”

  “They’re concerned for their own necks,” Rafael spat.

  “Naturally. Losing one’s immortality isn’t an easy or painless process. It’s agonizing, a loss so great it ruins you. I suspect that most of the High Ones will kill themselves after the source truly runs dry.”

  “You were mortal originally,” Rafael argued. “Can’t you return to your mortal form?”

  “If you live through the process,” Xian replied. “I only know of two people who ever managed it. The strength of our addiction to Erran’s blood is overwhelming. Can you see us losing our immortality, our power and our city and staying sane? No. Our servants don’t love us enough to care for us during the period of withdrawal, and thanks to opportunists like Daeva, our corpses will barely have time to cool before we’re split apart for mass consumption. A very tidy and poetic solution, really.”

  “This is…” Rafael shook his head. “This is unbelievable. Truly.”

  “Everyone on the council would love to agree with you, pet.”

  “So you’re all going to die.”

  “As everyone eventually should,” Xian said philosophically.

  “What does this mean for me?”

  “It means that you and I have some decisions to make.” Xian pulled his feet beneath himself suddenly and stood up. “But you’re in no condition to make them at the moment. You need to rest. I wish we had more time, Rafael, I truly do.” He bent down and unfastened Rafael’s ankles, then gently helped him to his feet. “I’m not going to bind you again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I never brought you here with the intention of giving you to the council for retribution, Rafael. Everything we’ve done so far has had another purpose. You have three immediate options—running, staying or killing, either me or yourself. If you choose to run,” he continued blithely, ignoring his apprentice’s stunned stare, “I suggest you find fresh clothes, and do be careful. The house is undoubtedly surrounded at this point. Killing me, well, we know how well that went last time. And if you try to kill yourself again, I’ll just revive you and make you suffer for it, but you can attempt it if you really want to.”

  Rafael looked down at his master’s hands gently encircling his wrists. Like the cuffs, but far stronger. “I’ll stay. For the moment.”

  “As you wish.” Xian let him go and Rafael immediately felt off balance. “There’s clean water in the bathing chamber, if you want to use it. Then I suggest you find yourself a room and sleep a bit more. You need to be rested before the next step.” Xian turned and walked away, leaving faint red footprints in his wake as he left the lofty room. Rafael shuddered when he lost sight of him. Moving slowly, his body still aching despite his master’s restorative blood, he also left the room, not even glancing back. That part of his life had just ended. The next part of it would be…confusing.

  Chapter Eight

  He’d start with a bath. The bathing chamber wasn’t far, and once inside Rafael saw it was well lit with torches and stocked with cleansing salt and oil scrubs and clean towels, as well as some simple house clothes. Rafael stripped off his filthy pants and tossed them aside, then climbed gingerly into the tub. The water was warm. Blissful. He sank in over his head and held his breath, savoring the soft, soothing feel of the water on his face for as long as he could before surfacing again. He picked up the closest scrub and removed the glass stopper and sniffed. Unscented. Not surprising for a man who needed to be undetectable.

  Rafael poured some of the fine granular mixture onto his palm and began to work it, very carefully, into his skin. He tried not to be
put off by the bizarreness of it all. By rights he should have been dead now, or at least heartily wishing he was, and instead he was bathing in his master’s house. He was still alive. He might even stay alive.

  Rafael recalled his last bath with a sudden flush. Gods, he must be happy to be alive if he was already thinking about sex. He lay back against the edge of the tub and closed his eyes, remembering. He had already been well-fucked, relaxed and open. He had leaned into Feysal, mounted him, rocked and swayed over him until his lover’s hand stroked him to completion at the same time that he came inside Rafael. It had been a gentle coupling compared with their earlier, deliberately violent encounter. Tender, almost sweet… He touched himself and imagined it was Feysal’s hand on him, coaxing him to hardness, but his cock refused to comply. Rafael huffed in irritation. Naturally his body would refuse to cooperate.

  It didn’t take long for him to figure out why. When he had last been with Feysal, Rafael had been operating under the assumption that he was his own man, years over his obsession with Xian. Now he knew that wasn’t true, that he’d actually never gotten over it. He’d scabbed over the wounds and insulated his capacity to feel under layers of sarcasm and disdain, but he knew now that he was still Xian’s creature, his apprentice, his pet. His to command, his to control, his to please…

  The sudden thought of Xian’s hand holding him made Rafael almost instantly hard, so hard his groin ached. He touched himself gently, closing his eyes and imagining Xian watching him, directing his actions. ‘Hold yourself like this, stroke like this…faster, slower, rub your palm over the head.’ He could see the blood flowing under the surface of his skin, feel his cock swelling further under Xian’s eyes. He moved a hand to his sac, happily spared from the touch of the lash and tight now, needy and heavy. He cupped it, rolled his balls between his fingers, squeezed and pulled them down and away from his body. He spared one finger for his hole, barely stroking the outside. His hands morphed into Xian’s in his mind, and suddenly he was spilling into the tub, jetting out into the warm, oily water at the thought of his master’s hands touching the entrance to his body with desire. Rafael came urgently, so hard he thought he might pass out, but as the physical ecstasy leaked away, the bizarre reality of his situation came back to him. Fucked. He was so fucked.