One of the patrons in the inn looked at him, but quickly averted his eyes. A man dressed in pure white among locals who wore light shades of blue and brown definitely stood out, but he was using his magic to put their feeble minds at ease. Not too much, though. He let them sense his lethal, superior presence, let them know they lived at the mercy of his whim.
He had not bothered to sit at a table like the rest of them did, sipping cool drinks, nibbling on grapes, and gossiping. He sat on a table, one of his legs propped against the inn’s low iron fence, the other straddling the back of a chair, rocking it absentmindedly. It was a ridiculous pose, but no one dared say anything. Despite their inherent failings, humans had a few worthy qualities.
Like survival instincts.
It was a beautiful day, not too hot. Patrons sat outside the establishments, enjoying the breeze and the sun and the company of one another. Such a perfect little place, so peaceful, so quiet.
Elia’s voice barely carried over, but it was still unmistakable. A purity of sound like no other. Velvet and cream laced into a human voice. Even he could appreciate it.
Calemore wondered what Damian would do when he met Elia the next time. He craved to see the dynamics of their encounter. He could not wait to see how the old fool would react to seeing her again, how she would respond to his murderous presence. Damian was torn between greed and love, and only the Father of Evil could hone such an emotional struggle to perfection.
“Aren’t you gonna pick those?” a voice called, distracting him.
Calemore turned. Well, not all humans possessed the right amount of survival instincts, it turned out. Some braved death. Others were just plain too stupid, like the little man accosting him.
“What’s that?” the White Witch asked politely, playing along.
“Them apple stubs. You gonna pick those?”
Damian’s son pondered the best way of killing the thing. A quick slash across the jugular? Maybe he should tear his beating heart out? No option sounded good enough. It was all too dramatic for this little place. There would be too much commotion. And he did not want to alert Elia.
Not yet.
The Witch stared at the apple cores as if seeing them for the first time. “Oh, those. Sure, I will.”
The other man deflated a little, but he did not seem to believe Calemore. He looked like a waiter. Or maybe the inn proprietor. Whoever he was, he took stubborn, suicidal pride in his establishment and work. Calemore could almost appreciate the single-mindedness. Such people, when bent on a purpose, could render miracles.
Quarreling with humans was almost like cheating a retard in a game of cards. You took glee in your winnings, you cherished the moments of false hope you gave them, but deep, deep down, you felt the tiny speck of guilt, not so much at being the superior being and having every right to toy with the lesser creatures, more sort of not really presenting yourself with any real challenge and eventually wasting your time.
After so long away from the realms—no, from the land that carried that name now—he yearned for some fun, but the moment was just not right. He would undo the years of careful work and planning. Even though immortality gave him the luxury to loiter, he did feel urgency and futility.
The Veil of Sundering, his own device designed to protect him against the retribution of the court, had finally weakened, eroded enough to let him through. He was back in the world that rightfully belonged to him. And the return brought with it a deep, almost primal sense of righteous purpose. The real reason he was back here. He had an unsettled score to finish, dating back to an age that survived in rare books, stories, and legends mostly.
Calemore could not allow simple, innocent mistakes and whim to undo generations of waiting and preparations. So he bent down and collected the half-dried, rusting cores, one by one. He was being a little melodramatic, putting too much emphasis in his motions. The human watched him, feeling victorious and maybe a little disappointed. He had probably expected the weird foreigner to put up a fight.
“There you go, sir,” the White Witch said, all smiles and dripping poison.
The unspoken communication was entirely lost with the other man. He remained somber and blunt and unimaginative. He nodded and went back to molesting the other customers. Calemore reached into his baggy coat pocket for another piece of fruit. There was none left. He had run out of apples.
He sighed and resolved himself to watching Elia. She had a sure-footed grace that was lost on humans. Even her little gestures were poetry. It would almost be a pity destroying that. But things had to be done.
The noon bells in the docks’ single lighthouse struck, announcing lunch break for most workers and shop owners. Calemore remained seated, observing, studying.
The fat man working in the tower came out onto the platform, stretching. Some distance away from the more affluent restaurants and inns, a pack of fishermen carefully laid down their nets and went into a nearby pub, one they could afford, leaving unpicked offal to the gulls.
The witch watched the city’s rich and bored walk about, deciding which place to go to, judging the crowds, usually swerving toward busier spots. Most of the small folk were eating wherever they worked or lived, but there were a few odd faces here and there. Tamora looked like a nice place. He could see why Elia would choose it as her refuge.
Calemore waited.
An hour past noon, a man came by, interrupting the class. It was her human lover, Ayrton.
The man was well past his prime, with gray hair and a walk that bespoke of a thousand battles. He carried himself with pride and dignity, a man content with his choices in life. Calemore smiled. Human hope was such a bitch.
Elia bade him wait. Patiently, the way only seasoned soldiers could be, Ayrton leaned against the building’s white wall, his old body and mind at ease. Without any hurry, Elia continued reciting from the poetry book, every note a rapture, and then finally, she ushered the kids back into the school.
It was not meant to last, Calemore knew.
Elia was immortal. She had seen hundreds of generations of mankind turn to dust. Choosing a human partner was useless. She knew he would grow old and die one day.
In a way, it almost irritated him. All his life, he had never once let illusions sweep him away, distract him. He knew who he was and what he was. He did not pretend or let tiny bubbles of sweet imagination fool him. Elia and Ayrton were deluding themselves with their foredoomed love story. They both knew the truth, and yet, they lived as if it didn’t really matter. It was annoying. It was almost sheer stupidity. They probably found it easier to cope that way, but there was no way they could really forget that harsh truth. Every morning they woke together, she knew her next day would be exactly the same, while he felt yet another grain of age weigh down his spine. She would stay frozen in her beautiful, immortal form, while he grew weak and feeble. How could he love her? How could he endure the pain of inferiority, the perpetual mockery he saw every single day?
Elia approached him, beaming happily.
Ayrton kissed her lightly on the cheek. She giggled like a girl. The man sat down on the grass, nursing his side absentmindedly. Too much fighting, too much time spent in the saddle and wielding a sword. The stooped back of a warrior, the winter pains in the worn joints. And yet, he was smiling, happy, blissful, ignorant. Even now, the old fool kept his illusion bright and shiny. He was training the city police, taught them combat tactics and survival, helped them uproot crime and hunt down smugglers. Even when his own strength and reflexes failed him, he would not let go.
Maddening.
His other kingdom, Naum, was a land of fear. Studying humans back home was difficult. Everyone dreaded him in the north, more than the blizzards, more than the black frost, more than the howl of the wolf winds that made people go blind. Men soiled their pants at the very mention of his name. Not even in their dreams did they dare think badly of him. He was everywhere, all the time. Naum was a mirror of his own image, and, as such, it was a place that had left him i
gnorant of human dynamics. It was a frozen bubble of another time, another world.
His return to the rest of the realms had given him a golden opportunity to refresh his long-lost craving for humanity. After all, he was the prototype.
Soon, it would all be his, as it should have been ages ago. Time was of no consequence, but the shame of failure was not. Every day, it stayed, never fading, never growing vague or obtuse.
Calemore left the inn without paying.
He wandered idly through Tamora, without aim or purpose. Back in the war, humans had mostly turned on themselves, fighting in the names of gods they worshipped, learning the art of atrocities as years went by. Very few nations and places had managed to stay isolated from the conflict, from taking a side or becoming one. The people of the Wild Islands had stood apart somehow, watching the earth shake and seas boil, but their island cage had survived. And then, there were the people of the far north, who had remained loyal to Calemore, even after the Pact of the Damned was announced. Naum, a land so badly devastated by magic that it had long forsaken its humanity. What else could they have done?
Calemore recalled the treachery, recalled the despair. He remembered all too well Simon’s plea to make peace, to betray his father. He had faced a terrible choice, face the same fate like Damian or become a puppet, become an illusion, and abandon his dream. So he had done the one sensible thing; he had fled north and walled himself up in cold magic, keeping his hunters away. They had thought his own prison just as good as Damian’s. But that was an arrogance only gods could harbor. The blind belief in their own timelessness, the refusal to accept an even higher truth. Everything had a start and an ending. Calemore’s exile was coming to an end. And with it, the realization of his destiny, postponed for thousands of years.
Human history books told it much differently, of course, those few that still had crusty pages on the Age of Sorrow, as they had called it here. No one really knew the truth anymore. They soon would.
Ah, he must be patient. He could not let whims destroy an age of careful planning.
His path took him to the lakefront. He stared at the calm pool of blue-brown water, dotted with fishing barges. Far across that lake, beyond the curve of the horizon, lay the former Safe Territories and his final destination.
A pack of street urchins was squatting in the mud by one of the abandoned piers, hunting crabs with sharpened willow stakes. The smaller children were crushing their armor with stones and chipping off the claws to sell as fortunes. Calemore wandered by, genuinely interested. Life at the brink of existence and society had always fascinated him.
He was bored. “Hey, children,” he called, “which one of you would like to earn some quick coin?”
Their collective eyes pierced him with cold, merciless intensity. The big kids stared at one another, weighing their options, calculating their next move. As always, the more perceptive among the humans stepped back, passing up the lucrative offer. Their minds could not comprehend the danger, but their animal instincts warned them.
Calemore watched them, trying to identify the greediest and the stupidest. A fat boy in the back seemed like the best choice.
“You.” He pointed. “Come with me.” He fished out a gold coin from his pocket, flashing it before the starved urchins. None of them had ever seen gold.
“You go, Buna. Go.” His friends goaded him, pushing him. Now that he was the center of attention, the fat kid was not so sure anymore. He shrank, trying to make himself smaller and less visible.
“Don’t be afraid. Nothing bad is going to happen,” the White Witch crooned.
Mesmerized with part fear, part shock, the fat kid followed the stranger deeper into the city, away from the lakefront, away from the world he knew. The alleys narrowed, and the crowds thinned.
Calemore was thinking about his own fragile existence. Not his life, his origin. Before making him the way he was, Damian had practiced a lot with other ideas. His first model had been sexless, an androgynous thing that had cared nothing for procreation. Calemore was grateful that idea had died with the creature. He could not imagine his life bereft of physical pleasures. Then, Damian had made a human with wings, another crazy, morbid idea. Another failure. But sometimes, when he dreamed, he could feel the sprouts of cartilage and bone and leathery flaps itch under his skin, bulging up behind his shoulder blades, trying to burst free. He could feel the tension in his back and neck, the growth of powerful muscles that could sustain flight. But then, he would wake up, his skin smooth and free of scars and bone calluses.
The boy looked genuinely afraid now. He seemed to have wet himself. But there was no going back. Calemore just smiled encouragingly and led him toward his den.
He made the boy seem invisible to the other patrons of the luxury inn he was staying in. He did not want to raise suspicion by showing up towing a gutter rat behind him. The innkeeper would probably be annoyed and might even ask questions. Calemore led the urchin up three long flights of stairs. He had hired an entire floor for himself.
“Go in there,” he said, pointing into a room.
The smelly child shuffled in, his eyes big and glazed with terror. Calemore followed, locking the door.
“Sit there.” He pointed at a single stool roughly in the center of the chamber. “C’mon. Sit there.”
The fat kid sat on the stool, his breeches squelching. He was trembling visibly. On the floor, near the stool, there was an earthen jar, filled with honey cakes.
“Sir?” he mumbled.
“What is it?” Calemore went into the room corner. There was a desk covered in a sheet of linen. A bulge of items lay hidden beneath a swath of cloth.
“Can I have a cookie, sir?” the orphan croaked, his sense of hunger overtaking his sense of danger.
Calemore grinned. “But of course. These are for you. Go ahead. Eat as many as you like.”
Hesitantly, the child bent down and reached for the cakes. His pudgy fingers dug into the bowl.
The White Witch unfurled the bundle and started setting up. He would need a few minutes anyway. Besides, the cakes would calm the child, exactly what he needed. A panicky orphan would be bad. He preferred them docile.
“Now, child, listen to me,” he spoke.
Buna stopped chewing. There were crumbs on his cheeks, pasted by tears and oily grime. He looked at the terrifying man in the white clothes, wondering what would happen next. The child did not really comprehend everything, but his primitive soul cringed.
“Listen carefully. Whatever I do now, you don’t move. Do you understand? You stay still, and you don’t move. You don’t fret; you don’t make a sound. If you do, I’ll wallop you on the ears. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded.
“Good. Now stay still.”
With that, Calemore propped a large easel in the center of the room, leaned a canvas on its sill, and started painting. He used oil paints, expensive mixtures with flakes of gold and silver and bronze that added special gleam to the colors. They had cost a fair sum, but money had never been a problem for him. Creating art was beyond magic, though.
The fat urchin sat on the stool, staring at the wall, his face locked with boredom and his muscles shackled with fear. Calemore worked the brush gently against the white canvas, dabbing on paint in tiny, careful strokes. An hour passed, and he had merely finished the boy’s filthy mouse-gray scalp. And then, he had to stop so the paint could dry.
“You can eat more cakes now,” he told the boy.
Buna exhaled deeply, letting out pent-up fear and exhaustion. He was still terrified, but less than before. The filthy hands dove into the jar, gripping the cakes with frenzy.
Calemore wished the oil paints could dry quickly enough to capture moments such as these. But he had to settle for static portraits. He could have used magic to speed up the drying, but it would ruin the beauty of his art.
He loved painting. It made him feel relaxed and serene. It made him feel more than just a perfect equation in the hands of gods.
Painting let his brain exercise its hidden depths, create things his makers could not have thought about. It was his liberation from perfection.
The White Witch sighed. He might never finish the painting, though. It could take weeks. By then, the boy could be rat food, become someone’s slave, die in a fight, or just disappear. And there was the other, more pressing matter to attend to. He didn’t know when Damian might finish his tasks, but as soon as he did, he would need to leave Tamora. Even so, he would keep the painting, like thousands of others he had made. He never threw them away. He kept them wrapped in sealskins buried in salt mines so they would last forever. Art was priceless.
“Enough. Sit still,” he ordered. The boy squirmed back onto the stool. “Like before. Fold your hands. That’s it. Don’t move.” Calemore resumed painting.
CHAPTER 23
Sergei should have been elated. Sergei should have been happy. Instead, he felt angry. And the air around him stank.
His military campaign had been a tremendous success so far. He had swept across Athesia like wildfire, decimating the defending forces, swallowing huge chunks of territory in a relentless march day and night. He had utterly and completely destroyed the Athesian legions, with minimal casualties on his side.
And yet, Roalas stood unconquered, teasing him.
The three-pronged attack had been executed with pinpoint precision, despite being coordinated across hundreds of leagues of terrain, with forces from several lands timing their attacks flawlessly. First, the Pum’be had struck, killing the army commanders, leaving the defenders headless. Some might call his act of assassination cowardly and without honor, but he called it smart. How many Parusite lives had been saved because they fought a confused enemy without leadership? Was there no honor in that? When Emperor Adam had murdered fifty thousand of his kin, had there been any honor in that?
Following the killings, wave upon wave of hungry, fierce, and bold Parusite troops had stormed across the border, plunging into the soft, exposed belly of the defending forces, tearing them apart. The Red Caps in the west; his own army, aided by mercenaries and their terrible olifaunts in the south; Oth Danesh pirates in the east. Perfect timing, round-the-clock attacks against the enemy, leaving the Athesians no time to recuperate, no time to regroup, and most importantly, no time to send an early warning of the attack back home.
The Broken (The Lost Words: Volume 2) Page 25
