by Dora Machado
She averted her eyes from his desperate groping, praying that her newfound Strength would be enough to accomplish a victory. He mumbled, huffed and groaned to no avail. When Lusielle dared to look up again she saw defeat on his face.
He growled. “You!”
She had known the risks and was prepared to pay the toll. She curled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms over her head, knowing that no remedy in the world could cure this man’s wrath and that his monumental defeat could only be surmounted through rage.
Chapter Eighty-four
IN AN INSTANT, BREN’S MIND SHIFTED from the fitful sleep’s blackness to the madness’s excruciating brilliance. The pain that had been consuming him in slow churns tripled with the light, launching into a new crescendo. The ague’s shriek returned and followed suit. Pain wracked his mind like a fork raking his brain. Every part of his body twitched and seized with the hurt. Just when he thought he couldn’t bear it any longer, the intensity rose again.
Bren screamed until his throat grew raw and his voice went hoarse. After that, he screamed some more.
“Welcome to the madness.” A fiery voice scalded his hearing. “Welcome to your death.”
A yank. A jerk. A jarring landing. An image of him, sitting in his father’s chair. The chair’s scrolled arms snaked over his arms and twisted around his wrists to strap him down. The legs in the shape of paws grew formidable claws. The claws crunched against his crushed bones as they sank into his ankles to hold him fast. A shallow panting was the only way he could manage to breathe and even then, air barely made it to his starving lungs.
It was just an image, he told himself, a vile trick of his ailing mind. Right now, he was lying on his bed in the lord’s chamber at the Laonian hall in Teos. He had to pay attention. There was knowledge in the madness, insight in the revelations he would receive. He would not live to reap the benefits, but the revelations could prove helpful to preserve Laonia, understand the curse’s intricate workings and ensure an end to it once and for all.
“You want insight?” the voice said. “I’ll give it to you.”
His father’s strapping figure came together from a flash of light, the closely cropped beard, the distinguished silver glint streaking his temples, the dashing figure he had cut at the time of his death, dressed fashionably in the deep hues of Laonian blues.
“Give it up, my boy,” he said. “You’re the last one. There’s no one left to hear whatever knowledge you’ll get out of the madness. No one cares.”
It was a trick of the madness, trying to disable him, trying to get him to surrender, but Bren wouldn’t budge, even if the torture was enough to make him crave death’s numbness.
“You’re a stubborn one,” his father said. “Why do you hang on so tight? Why endure the pain? Why incur more of the same? Life’s but a string. Cut it and you’re free.”
It would have been easy to do as his father said. It would have been sane. But Bren couldn’t give up. Not yet. He had to discharge his final duty before he died.
“Who are you?” Bren said. “What’s your name?
“Why, I’m Edmund, your father. Don’t you remember me?”
“You’re not my father. You’re the wicked fiend who cursed him. Even you must have a name.”
“For you, I have no name.”
“Why did you curse my father?” Bren said. “What did he do to anger you?”
“I’ve got to give it to you,” Edmund said, shaking his head. “Even at this late hour, you’re still trying to beat the curse. You want to know my name and the reason for the curse. Do you still want to redeem the curse? Will you ask if you can right my wrong next?”
“I would if I could,” Bren said. “I’d right whatever wrong was done to you, if you told me how.”
“Aw.” Edmund smiled. “Do you think you’re so noble and dedicated? Do you think you ought to be credited for acting rightly on occasion? Allow me to remind you about some of your more glaring character flaws.”
His father deconstructed into the fleshy lump giving form to Nelia. She materialized before Bren with the dirk in her hand and put the deadly point to his belly. When he looked down, he sat naked and defenseless with the point of the dirk pressed against his belly button.
“Now you’re gonna know,” Nelia said. “What they felt like, as you killed them.”
She wiped a tear from her eye. The tear on her fingertip thickened and fell to the ground, transforming into a woman holding Nelia’s hand. It was Godivina, Nelia’s sister, and when she held out her free hand, two other women sprang from her fingers, recreating the ghastly trio who frequented Bren’s nightmares. Their faces were alight with scorn. They cheered when Nelia’s dirk drew blood. They clapped as the long blade plunged into his belly button’s lapsed channel.
A macabre fountain of blood spurted from his belly. “It’s a dream,” Bren rasped, but the pain was real. It burned through his gut, sharp and vicious. Thinking about the murdered women, he knew he deserved the suffering. He could never fathom forgiveness from any one of them and yet nothing could atone for his last murder.
“For you,” he whispered, embracing the terrible pain. “I’m sorry.”
“Now you have regrets?” Nelia twisted the dirk in his belly. “Too late. Vengeance is sorrow’s best alternative.”
Bren gasped with every agonizing turn of the blade. “Alishia! Godvina! Levinia!”
“What is it, boy?” Nelia hissed. “Don’t you believe in revenge?”
“He doesn’t,” another voice said, and Nelia’s face rippled to form the familiar features of Ethan’s broad face. “Ladies?”
The three women holding hands flowed back into his body. Water dripped from Ethan’s dark hair, drenched his clothing and dribbled from his mouth and nose, as if the floods he had fought so hard in life stalked him beyond the grave. He withdrew the dirk from Bren’s belly, but only to lick the bloody blade.
“You were always slow to spill blood, little brother. You were never worthy of the sword of Uras.”
“I tried to be true to Uras,” Bren said hoarsely. “Wait. You’re not Ethan. Why do you do this?”
“A curse is life’s affair,” the creature hiding behind Ethan’s features said. “Death is nourishment, craft is breath, work is life, grief is gold.”
“Why won’t you stop this?”
“‘Cause I can’t,” the creature said. “‘Cause I don’t want to. ‘Cause I don’t care. It’s too late. You’ve failed. You never served our house with the brutality it required, never lusted for blood. In a field of hundreds, you killed only three.”
“The tests,” Bren said. “The trials—”
“They’re amusing,” he said. “They’re entertaining.”
Bren’s heart jolted with the sting. “You mean they made no difference?”
“You used those as excuses to allow our line to die. You balked, Brennus, you dallied, and ultimately refused to do your duty. In doing so, you neglected our cause. Our line went extinct under your watch.”
“I didn’t—”
Ethan’s features shifted into Robert’s ruddy face. “You never applied yourself. Did you? You were never a patient learner to my teachings, a welcomed presence in my study. I might have toyed with the idea of taking you into my confidence and showing you the riddle I found in Father’s library before I burned it, but you were too stupid.”
“I sat with you for many hours,” Bren said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Excuses,” Robert said. “Disappointment. You let us down. You deserve to die in agony.”
The dirk struck. Again and again the blade came down on his thigh, lacerating his leg, puncturing through muscle, clinking sharply against the bone. Bren screamed, reliving the brutal stabbing with each thrust.
“Be still, my lord, calm down.” A familiar voice reached him from a distant place.
Robert’s form melted into a bubbling pool on the floor. From each roiling boil, the tiny figures of armed men and women popped up,
running through the streets of a diminutive city, dragging the decapitated bodies of the traitors behind them.
Bren recognized the purge, the riots that had followed Robert’s death and the attempt to overthrow the house of Uras. Only this time, the rioters were intent on him. Like soldiering ants, they mounted his bare feet by the hundreds, hacking at his toes with hoes, rakes and axes, torturing his shins with the tiny torches they put to his flesh, climbing up his legs in writhing heaps.
He tried to shake them off. “Let me be. Please! Not me!”
The horde’s attack left him bloody, sweaty and sore. On his shoulder, the tiny rioters melded into the shape of a hand that grew into an arm, a shoulder, a body, a face, until fair Harald was standing before Bren.
“My dear brother,” he said. “Did you think you’d do better than me? All these efforts to avoid the madness and last longer than the rest of us, and yet here you are, proving that you’re a fool without merit.”
Harald edged the scar on Bren’s cheek with the sharp blade. Bren had a vision of himself holding his signet ring with a pair of pliers and pressing it into a pile of coals, until the silvery edges glowed with the coals’ blistering glint. The stink of burning flesh filled his nostrils. The same horrific sting that had scalded his cheek spread like flames over the side of his face, scorching the skin, devouring the gristle beneath it, and blackening the exposed bone.
“Did you burn the ring on your face because you hated yourself?” Harald asked. “Or did you do it because you thought you were better than me? Did you think you might feign compassion with a tear stamped on your face? If I, who was the fairest of us, couldn’t complete the hunt, what made you think that you, scarred and damaged as you are, could ever find the Goddess’s true mark?”
Bren was tightly restrained in the madness, but in some other place, his hands were slapping the scorching fire, his fingers scraped off the flames and someone else was fighting to keep him from tearing out his face.
“Do you really think she liked you?” Harald laughed a cruel cackle. “Why, little brother, your manners with the ladies leave much to be desired. They don’t like you. They find you foul and loathsome, as they should. How pretentious to think she might feel something for you. At least my kills went blissfully happy to their graves. Yours wept all the way.”
“Shut up!” Bren said. “Shut up, whoever you are! You’re not my brother. You’re not any of my kin, for they loved me as I loved them!”
“Really?” Harald smirked. “All those people who loved you. Where are they now? Your few remaining Twenty are sleeping in the hall. Hato is notable for his absence. Did you think the old man was going to be loyal to the end? He’s probably swearing allegiance to Riva as we speak.”
“Hato?” Bren called out. “Hato!” Who would record his revelations if not Hato? He had sworn he would be by his side during the madness. Where was he?
“And the woman,” Harald said. “Where’s she when you need a sip of that potion you like so much?”
“She would’ve been here,” Bren rasped, “if she could.”
“But she’s not,” Harald said. “She’s busy at the moment. Care to see?”
The creature held up a crystal pitcher of water. An image of Aponte standing over Lusielle besieged Bren’s addled mind. She curled on the ground, limp and listless. Aponte’s boot crashed into her ribcage. His fist landed on her flesh with a hollow thump. Bren clenched his jaw so hard his teeth bled. The taste of blood, caustic and hot, flavored his mouth.
“Was she one of Riva’s moles or was she one of mine?” Harald said, setting the pitcher aside. “Happy or sad, free or suffering, who cares? You’ve got no more grief to give her.”
Bren wept, giving in to the desolation that had lived within him for the last ten years, suffering the horror of knowing that Lusielle had been returned to the abuses of Aponte’s cruelty. But even in his misery, he discovered something extraordinary. Lusielle was alive! She had not died in the river as Riva had said. She still lived and even if Aponte was capable of changing that, Bren rejoiced at every moment she existed.
The news strengthened his resolve and dispelled the terror that had so effectively assailed him. “She’s not dead,” Bren said. “She’s not one of Riva’s moles. She’s not one of yours either.”
“How would you know?”
“I know ‘cause she’s mine and mine alone.”
There was no doubt in Bren’s mind he was telling the truth, no uncertainty and no regret. He had done many wrongs in the name of duty during the last four years, but he had done right by Lusielle and she had done right by him.
Harald’s look-alike fought to retain his shape, buckling for a moment before reclaiming his father’s form, granting Bren the briefest glimpse of the elusive face behind it.
“You’ve come for knowledge,” Edmund said, “and knowledge I shall give you. It’s what you crave most, here at the end. Isn’t it? You’d like to know: Why was I cursed? Why did your brothers have to die? Why did you have to suffer as you do?”
“You owe me the truth.”
“Is that why you’ve come so gladly to the madness?” Edmund said. “To learn something important, something that will give worth to your death? How about this? Robert was correct. The riddle he found in Laonia’s library was one of my verses. I am also the author of the verses Hato found. Together, all those verses were part of a scroll. Perhaps the scroll could’ve been used to neutralize Laonia’s curse. Perhaps not. You’ll never know. But I’ll give you what you wanted most: the reason why I cursed your father. The final verse, the last piece of the scroll, the strip your father burned with these very hands back when he thought he’d outsmarted the curse.”
“Wait,” Bren said, trying to understand. “My father burned the last verse of the scroll even before Robert burned the verse he found?”
“It was a simple solution, the prescribed way of destroying curses in the old days, the logical thing to do. He cut up the scroll and scattered the other verses hoping to neutralize the curse. Then he burned the last verse. But your father didn’t count on the curse’s accomplished perfection. Pay attention, lad, ‘cause you’ll be the only one who’ll ever know what happened.”
Bren’s heart drummed an uneven beat. The pain demanded all his attention, but he focused on Edmund instead. It was Bren’s turn to learn from the madness. He had been determined to survive the torture in order to secure the revelations. He had no chance to beat the curse and yet he couldn’t fail Laonia.
Edmund spoke slowly, softly, an insidious whisper, five sentences of veiled meaning, thirty words that Bren tried to commend to his memory with every bit of will he could muster from his weary being. He was shocked and incensed at the same time.
But when he next tried to remember the verse, he couldn’t. The lines were stowed away somewhere in his fragile mind where his memory couldn’t reach them. The words were like bubbles driven by a whimsical breeze. Every time he came close to remembering a notion, it disappeared like bubbles bursting in midair.
“You can’t remember.” Edmund cackled. “For you, I saved my best. As long as you’re conscious, the words aren’t meant to thrive in your head. It’s your bane to die ignorant, useless and abandoned like the reviled outlaw and the rogue killer you’ve become.”
It was a devastating blow. His life’s meaning had been gutted. All his efforts had been voided. He had tried. By the Twins, he had. Where was Hato? How could he tell him that he had forgotten the truths he had been granted? Wasn’t it enough misery that he had fallen short in life? Did he have to fail in death as well?
He lunged for Edmund, and although he was bound in the madness, his hands found a fragile neck somewhere else. A surge powered his strength. There was screaming and struggle, but he didn’t want to forgo the only chance he might have to try the simplest solution, destroying the monstrous source of such misery.
“No, my lord, let go!” someone was shouting. “You’ll kill her! My lord!”
He d
idn’t get to kill the wretch before someone came to the monster’s aid, but at least he got to try. He couldn’t recognize the people who had come to the creature’s defense, but he was furious with the scum who had thwarted justice.
“And to think those men once called themselves your friends.” Edmund shook his head sadly. “The Twenty were never trustworthy. You were always alone and worthless, deserted, betrayed and despised.”
The Twenty? Had he been fighting some of his own men in his madness? Oh, gods, he hoped he hadn’t killed any of them. Misery chilled him like a pail of iced water and left him shivering. How much more of this could any man endure?
“You can’t trust anybody,” Edmund said. “She betrayed you, left you for Khalia, for Teos, for power. Hato has left you too, sold out to Riva and abandoned you on your deathbed. All those traitors. So many enemies.”
“No, no, no!” He had tried; he had worked hard to become something better than just a desperate killer. “Was there ever a way to beat the curse? Did any of us ever have a chance?”
“There’s no way to defeat the curse,” Edmund said. “You were never worthy of loyalty. You were always meant to be your line’s bane. You shouldn’t live to see another sunrise, but if perchance you make it through the night, your survival will precipitate Laonia’s final blight. It will descend upon Laonia with the light. You see, Brennus, you were always a foul thing, you were always meant for slaughter.”
Bren felt the madness contracting about his reason, his sense of self slipping away like a loose glove. He tried to focus on something good and wholesome to pluck out of the grisly lot of his life, something worth remembering. It wasn’t easy. So much sorrow and sadness. So much horror. That is, until he thought of the last few weeks of his life.
“What kind of crime turns a good man into a wanted fugitive?” Lusielle had asked.
“You’re assuming I’m a good man.”
She had looked him straight in the eye. “That part I know.”
There had been peals and chimes of sweet laughter, and a swarm of golden butterflies brightening the green eyes like the sun rising over the Laonian steppes.
