by Carol Berg
“Did you see him running? He runs like you, easy and light and very fast. He spent the morning digging in the sand by the stream and scooping water in his hand to fill up the holes he made. So patient—No, listen to me, Seyonne, my friend. You are not going to hurt me or anyone. Every time the boy scooped water in his hand, he spilled most of it before he got it to his little holes. But he would squat down beside the hole and pour his tiny bit of water in and watch it disappear into the sand. Then he would sigh and go back to the stream to try again. You see? He is patient like you. How often have you tried to teach me to cast a vermin barrier? Am I the stupidest Ezzarian ever born? Yet without reproach, you try again and again to teach me these simplest of skills. You, who can see the patterns in the world, who can unravel mysteries that no one else can begin to understand. I’ve never known anyone who sees so clearly ...
The man was a fool. I couldn’t see. Everywhere I turned was darkness. Terror lapped at the fires of my blood thirst and soon became a flood. At any moment I would take that dreadful step where there would be nothing under my foot, and I would plunge into the abyss. I would become the one I feared ... the one who held sway over my dreams and visions.
But the strong hands did not let go, and the calm voice did not stop. Before long the tide of fear began to ebb, and I allowed the strong hands and the calm voice to guide me back into the light. “... Apologize. I thought you were ready for a longer stay. You seemed so much better.”
The world began to come back into focus ... a dappled woodland, a dusting of new green on the bare branches. The smell of damp earth and new growth. A steep angle to the sunlight. A stream mumbling beside the path, half hidden behind a tangle of willows.
“Here. Let’s stop and have a drink. We could both use it, I would guess. Are you ready?”
Numb, unspeaking, I dropped to my knees where he pointed. The rippling water was cold on my scarred and bony hand, still soiled from Elinor and Gordain’s garden. I scooped out a handful of the clear, cold water and scrubbed at my hands, letting the muddy dregs drain into the new-sprung grass. Splashed another handful on my face, and then another on my neck, cleaning off the sweat of sun and madness. I looked at the water in my cupped hand and imagined a tiny bronze fist carrying water so carefully across the sand to a childish enterprise. Evan-diargh-son of fire. Smiling, I drank down my own treasure and three more besides, and then sat back, leaning my head wearily against a tree.
“You’re getting very good at this,” I said to the dark-haired man who sat cross-legged beside me, having drunk his own fill of the sweet water. “How long until you tire of preventing mad Wardens from destroying the world?”
Blaise smiled his crooked smile. “I will do whatever is necessary. So my mentor has taught me.”
“I can’t go back there again.”
“You’ll go back. He’ll not grow up without knowing you. I’ve promised you that already. We’ll just have to work some more before you do. What set it off this time? Have you had more dreams?”
I ran my fingers through my damp hair and pondered the question. “The same dreams come every night. Nothing new.” Dreams of an enchanted fortress and a mystery that terrified me. “Elinor and I were talking about farming. About my father. About Ezzaria. And then you and Evan came ...”
“We were running. Were you afraid for him? Was that it?”
“No. Just the opposite. I was so grateful for your sister and Gordain. I couldn’t ask for a better home for him. No. It must have been something else ...” I hated that I could never remember exactly what set off these attacks—the storms of violence that had riven my soul ten times in the past eight months since the first one in Vayapol, when three beggars had tried to rob Blaise’s foster brother Farrol. I had come near killing them all, friends and robbers alike, as if they somehow deserved it by their very act of breathing.
My demon was the cause, I believed. Angry. Resentful. Trapped behind the barriers I had built in some vain belief that I could control my own soul long enough to understand my dreams and face their consequences. I was sure this waking madness was my demon’s raging.
But as I searched my memory for the key, I ran across something more immediately distressing. “Oh, Verdonne’s child! Elinor guessed that I’m Evan’s father. She thinks I’m planning to take him away. Blaise, you’ve got to go back. I was trying to reassure them, and then I go mad in front of their door. They must be terrified.”
“Stubborn Ezzarian—seems like I advised you to tell them everything.” Blaise jumped to his feet and offered me his hand. “As soon as you’re safely asleep, I’ll go back.” We started walking briskly down the trail, Blaise working the enchantments that took us farther than the number of our steps and true geography would admit, the sorcery that kept my son’s location hidden from me. Much as I longed to be a father to Evan-diargh, I could not trust myself with the most precious thing on earth. And even if I were cruel enough to uproot him from the only home he had ever known, I had no place to take him.
My life as a Warden of Ezzaria, a sorcerer-warrior in my people’s thousand-year battle to save the human world from the ravages of demons, had almost ended before it had begun, when I was enslaved by the Derzhi. But after sixteen years of bondage, the Prince of the Derzhi had returned my freedom and my homeland, and I had taken up my Warden’s calling once again, only to discover that the secret war we Ezzarians had fought with such diligence for ten centuries was a war against ourselves. The rai-kirah—the demons—were not wicked beings bent on destruction of human reason, but fragments of our own souls, ripped away by an ancient enchantment and banished to a frozen, bitter land called Kir‘Vagonoth. The birth of my son and my meeting with Blaise had convinced me that whatever the reasons for this ancient sundering, it must be undone.
My child had been born joined to a rai-kirah. Possessed. As it was impossible to remove a demon from an infant, Ezzarian law demanded that such children be killed. But before I even knew of his birth, my wife had sent our son away until he was old enough for us to heal. My search for the child led me to Blaise, an Ezzarian also born demon-joined, a young outlaw of generous heart and inner peace—a wholeness, a completion, that led me to understand our nature and the terrible split that had occurred so many centuries before. Blaise taught me what my race and the demons were meant to be, and so I set out to free the rai-kirah from their exile by unlocking the way to our ancient homeland called Kir‘Navarrin. To accomplish this task, I was forced to put my new beliefs to the test and join myself with a powerful demon named Denas.
But my own people could not accept what I tried to tell them. A possessed Warden was an abomination, the ultimate corruption and an unimaginable danger. Once they understood that the change I had undergone was irreversible, the Ezzarian queen, my own wife, Ysanne, had stuck a knife in me and left me to die.
As I lay bleeding, I was tormented by visions of a dark fortress that lay deep in Kir‘Navarrin. Demon memory and crumbling artifacts told us that someone powerful and dangerous was imprisoned there. Fear of this prisoner had caused my ancestors to reive their own souls, to destroy all evidence of their history, and to lock themselves out of Kir’Navarrin. My death visions, so vivid as to bear the patina of truth, showed me the face and form of that prisoner—and they were my own. Unfathomable mystery, yet I believed ... I feared ... that I dreamed true.
If the prisoner in the fortress endangered human souls, then my Warden’s oath, my training, and my history demanded that I be the one to confront that danger. But for eight months my dreams had held me paralyzed, and now, I seemed to be going mad.
CHAPTER 2
Just after sunset Blaise and I came onto a dirt lane on the shabby outskirts of Karesh, a town in the southern Empire where the remnants of the outlaw band of the Yvor Lukash were working garden plots and learning trades, waiting to see if their truce with the Prince of the Derzhi would come to anything.
“Do you want to stop and wash?” Blaise paused outside the local washing house,
a dank and dismal shack built around a sporadic little spring of marvelously pure warm water. For a copper coin, the corpulent proprietor would give you half an hour of access to a pool lined with cracked tile and use of a towel that had likely not been clean since Verdonne was a mortal maiden.
I sighed and tried to ignore the stink of farmwork and madness. “It would be delightful, but you need to be on your way.”
So instead we hurried down an alley and up a dusty wooden stair to a room on the third floor of a locksmith’s shop. There I sat on one of two straw-filled mattresses and munched sour cheese and bread, while Blaise mixed a sleeping potion. I didn’t trust my own fingers to do it, as if my resident demon might alter the formula to prevent my safe sleep. I was a sorcerer of considerable power and a warrior of long experience. If I set my demented mind to murder, it was no simple matter to prevent it. But once I had slept a sound night after one of my attacks, I seemed to be myself again. Until the next time.
“When will you go to Kir‘Navarrin and be rid of this?” said Blaise as he crushed a few leaves and dropped them into a cup with a spoonful of wine and a few pinches of white powder. “You know what I was—a raving, drooling idiot, more beast than man. I couldn’t even feed myself, and in less than a day there ... Stars of heaven, even after all these months I can’t explain the difference. To be whole again. To see clearly, as if someone had popped my eyes back into their proper sockets. Surely it would help you.”
Confined to the human world, Blaise and the few other Ezzarians born demon-joined had faced a terrible choice. Their demon natures allowed them to shift their forms at will—a talent those of us born unjoined had never even suspected. But after a number of years of shapeshifting, their bodies lacked some essential component to remain stable. A day would come—some sooner, some later—when they would shift into beast form and be unable to shift back again, quickly losing their human intelligence. I had come to believe that entering Kir‘Navarrin would solve their problem, and it was for this—for my child’s future and for Blaise, as much as anything else—that I had joined with Denas to unlock the gateway. But I had not yet passed through the gate myself.
“Your problem was something normal—a natural progression of your life,” I said. “Mine is not. I can’t risk the passage until I understand what this cursed Denas is up to.”
“The demon is a part of you already,” said Blaise, “joined as you were meant to be. Gods above, man, you walked your own soul and saw the truth of it—there was no separate being inside you. You’ve told me fifty times how you long to enter Kir‘-Navarrin. So go there and be healed before you kill yourself or someone else.”
I pulled at my hair, as if to let some light and air into the thickness of my head. “He is not me. Not yet. He sits in my belly squirming, as if I’ve eaten something that wasn’t quite dead. I think he’s the one that’s so determined to get there”
The golden demon who called himself Denas and I had relinquished our separate lives for common purpose, and for the few hours it took us to accomplish that purpose, we had reached an accommodation. But it would have been hard to gauge which one of us had been more reluctant. He had suffered in a frozen wasteland for a thousand years, believing my people had destroyed his own. I had been trained to believe demons devoured human souls in unending lust for evil. Neither intellect nor pragmatism could overcome my sense of violation, of corruption, of certainty that Denas was waiting for one moment of weakness to enslave my will to his.
I raised the bread and cheese to my mouth and put it down again. I wasn’t all that hungry. “Whatever is causing these episodes, I daren’t let down my guard. If Denas can drive me to do murder now, what would I be if we were fully joined?”
Blaise handed me a clay cup, and I downed the purple-gray liquid it contained, followed by water to drown the foul taste. “You will be the man you have always been. The rai-kirah will bring you memories and ideas, talents, perhaps new ways of looking at the world. But it can’t be so simple to corrupt a human soul. Not one such as yours.” He smiled and threw a wadded blanket at me. “You’re far too stubborn.”
I wasn’t so confident. Even if I dared cross into the demon homeland, there was a finality about passing through the enchanted gateway—so I had been told. Once that step was taken, Denas and I would be completely merged, all barriers between us dissolved forever. My visions implied that I was the danger that raged in Tyrrad Nor, threatening to destroy the world. If I could not control my own hand, my own soul ... That could be the very circumstance that caused the danger. Occasional bouts of madness might be better.
Five minutes and my limbs felt like they belonged to someone else. As my vision blurred and my head spun, Blaise donned his black cloak and a slouched hat and blew out the candle. “Joining with the rai-kirah was the right thing to do. You’ll learn what you need to solve this.”
“One more thing,” I said drowsily as he opened the door to go. “Tell your sister that we did not lay Evan out to die. I was off fighting demons, and Ysanne ... Ysanne sent him to you. We didn‘t—either one of us—want him dead. Not for a moment. Not ever.”
“I’ll tell her everything, Seyonne. Sleep well.”
As a disturbing result of my condition, most of Blaise’s people—even the few like Blaise with inborn demons of their own—were a bit afraid of me. Certainly everyone respected my privacy. Thus, it was a surprise when someone burst into my room not a quarter of an hour after Blaise had left. When the visitor’s feet accidentally kicked over an empty water jar, my descent into drugged stupor was temporarily suspended. Light flared in my face.
“Spirit’s flesh! Dak was right. You’re still here. I thought you’d gone off with Blaise again.” The intruder, a short, round-faced man with thinning hair, was Farrol, Blaise’s dearest childhood friend and foster brother. Farrol, a man neither subtle in action nor temperate in opinion, had been born as well with his demon nature intact.
“Only a moment and I’ll be safely out of the way,” I mumbled, letting my eyelids sag. My body felt like river-bottom mud.
“But it was you the messenger wanted. Said it was urgent.”
“Messenger?” I wedged open the gates of sleep.
“Said he’d come from Prince Aleksander. Cursed Derzhi bastard—acted like we were some kind of vermin. Blaise had only just left, so I sent the fellow after him ... and after you, I thought.”
“From the Prince?” I dragged myself up to sitting. Blaise and I had been scheduled to meet with Aleksander on the day of the spring equinox. But the Prince, bearing the burden of his father’s empire if not the crown as yet, had sent word that he would have to delay until midsummer. That was still more than two months away. “What did he say exactly?”
“Said he was to give the message directly to the Ezzarian what was the Prince’s slave, the one with the slave mark on his face. Said the message couldn’t wait. Had to deliver it himself.”
“The Prince’s slave ... Those were his exact words?”
“Aye. Arrogant, sneering fellow, he was.”
Aleksander would never refer to me as his slave. Not anymore. Not to a Derzhi messenger whom he would wish to treat me with respect. “Tell me what he looked like, Farrol. His colors ... a scarf or a crest on his shield or his sword or somewhere on his dress ... And tell me about his hair. Did he have a braid?” I reached for the cup of water Blaise had left on the table by my bed and poured the contents over my head to force my foggy mind awake.
“Looked like any cursed Derzhi. Armed to the teeth. Riding an eighteen-hands bay that Wyther or Dak would kill for. No scarf, but a tef-coat over his shirt. An animal on it—a shengar, maybe, or a kayeet. I don’t know. His braid was like any of the arrogant bastards. Long. Light-colored. Tied with a blue ... no, it was a purple ribbon on the left side of his head. Why do you care? What’s wrong?”
I jammed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to think. “The braid—which side of his head was it?”
Farrol kicked at the empty
water jar. “I don’t know. What does it—?”
“Think, Farrol. You said left. Which was it?”
The round man threw up his hands. “Left, I think ... yes, it was the left. That’s how I saw the color of the ribbon because the fire was on his left.”
Left ... spirits of darkness! I staggered to my feet and grabbed Farrol’s arm. “We’ve got to go after them. Hurry. Help me wake up, and get me a sword.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s no messenger. He’s a namhir—an assassin.” And Blaise was leading him straight to my son.
By the time Farrol had poured enough strong tea down me that I wouldn’t fall off a horse, we were a half hour behind Blaise and the Derzhi assassins; namhirra always traveled in threes. As we raced through the moonlit woodland, Farrol traversing the enchanted ways as Blaise did, all I could think of were the murderous warriors venting their fury on Evan, Elinor, Blaise, and Gordain when they realized they could not fulfill the death vow they had made to their heged lord. Unless Blaise noticed them and shook them off, they could follow him right through the paths of enchantment just as I did. And Blaise was tired and worried, and even in the best of times he lacked a warrior’s instincts.
Through the open forest of oak and ash, down into stream-cut gullies thick with willow and alder, over a rocky ridge. Each time the route was slightly different, enough that even an experienced tracker could not duplicate it or detect the signs of an earlier passing. By the time Farrol raised his hand in warning, I was grinding my teeth.
“It’s a direct way, now,” whispered Farrol. “Over this ridge will take you in behind the house. How do you want to work this?”
I dropped lightly from the horse and yanked my sword from its scabbard. “Circle left and get to the house through the goat pen. Your task ... the only one ... is to get the family away.” I gripped his leg. “Don’t think you can fight these men, Farrol, nor can Gordain or Blaise; namhirra are extremely skilled and failure is worse than death to them. I’ll try to draw them away.” And then I would find out what in the name of night they were doing here. “Go!”
