by Carol Berg
This is but the beginning, lad. You are still bound to earth and flesh, but I can set you free. If you but say the word, everything will be yours as was ordained from the beginning of time.
I would hear him. But I had things to do that could not wait. I closed my eyes, touched my power, and embraced the Warden’s fading dream.
CHAPTER 30
“Take my hand, ” I said, stretching out as far as I could manage on the clifftop. “I won’t let you fall. ” Through the murk I could see only his pain-filled eyes and the hands that clawed at the crumbling earth. “It’s all right. I’m here to help you. ” Yellow lightning split the growing darkness, and the ground shook with thunder as the clouds released the deluge. “We’ll get you out of this. ” With one more extension, I touched his fingers. A flare of hope in his despair and he lunged upward, catching my fingertips just as I clamped my left hand on his wet wrist and heaved. “Now, hold on tight, ” I said, gritting my teeth against the pull of his weight. He held...
... and I opened my eyes to frigid darkness.
What expression of words or images can conjure a moment of perfect horror? No matter what the mind’s true voice professes, when you smell and feel, taste and see the stuff of your worst nightmare, it is difficult to believe you are not living it. Absolute darkness. Bitter cold. The stench of human blood and waste, and the acrid residue that torture leaves on unwashed skin. A floor that has no more substance than the unyielding midnight enveloping body and soul. For one terrible instant I believed that the past year had been but a delusion and that I was still captive in the pits of Kir‘Vagonoth. But then I felt someone beside me, sobbing quietly in the darkness. I recognized that anguish: the hopelessness of pain that never eased, of feeling reason guttering like the flames of a spent candle.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, laying one hand on his huddled back and another on his arm to keep him from scrambling away in shock. His skin was cold and damp with sweat, and he was quivering like a frightened animal. “I’ve come to get you out.”
“Who’s there? I dreamed ...” A trembling hand touched my arm, then recoiled sharply. “No one there. No one. A trick aren’t you? The devils’ trick.” Through the palpable darkness, I felt him retreat into himself and begin rocking back and forth—the prisoner’s comfort and the madman’s. “I won’t tell you anything. Do as you will.” Even in this dreadful place, I could smile. I recognized the voice and the determination. Drych.
“Hush, stubborn lad, I’m no trick. Seems you’re not an easy man to kill. Last time I saw you, we were in another vile predicament, but we both survived it.”
The rocking stopped, and soon I felt the cold hand again, fumbling about my shoulder and then my face, until it rested on my left cheekbone, where I wore the Derzhi scar. “Master ... is it you? Oh, gods, please be real ... oh, holy gods ...”
“It’s all right,” I whispered, gathering the trembling Drych into my arms as if I could shield him from one more moment of fear and pain if I could but get enough of myself around him. “I’m quite real, I think, though some questions remain as to how I got here. Can you walk?”
“N-not sure.” His teeth chattered so violently he could scarcely speak. The pits were buried beneath the surface of Kir‘-Vagonoth, not so bitter as the windy landscape above, but carved from ice, nonetheless, with no scrap of softness or comfort to ease the brutal cold.
“Let’s get you on your feet.” I draped his arm across my shoulders and hauled him up. A quickly muffled cry told me that his injuries were not confined to his dreams, but I dared not cast a light to examine him or keep him one moment longer in that place. I had no idea of how long I could remain with him on this magical journey or what power I might possess to fend off his captors.
“This way,” I said, steadying him as we walked, using my senses and the memories I had inherited from Denas to choose our direction through the stinking nothingness, trying to ignore the surety of demons lurking nearby. We climbed a short sloping way, and I soon felt a hard surface beneath my feet, rather than the formless uncertainty of the pits.
To walk out of the pits of the Gastai was no easy matter for either the demons or their unlucky prisoners. You could wander forever, yet have strayed no more than ten paces from where you’d begun unless you had been told the secrets of the ever-changing passages ... or happened to be the one who had devised the confusions of enchantment that kept the mad ones locked away. And so I had done in my thousand-year exile, trying to protect my people from their degenerate brethren—I who had made my home in Kir‘Vagonoth, not I who had been imprisoned here.
My head came near splitting from the effort of thinking in such ways. How stupid, attempting to keep separate all the memories that insisted on jumbling themselves together. Though I had given Denas no time to remember his life before the split, all his knowledge and experience of this world lay at my beck. Become part of me at the moment of our initial joining, a thousand years were mine every bit as much as my childhood in Ezzaria or my years of bondage to the Derzhi.
Piercing howls like the cries of the zhaideg, the desert scavenger wolf, broke out behind us. Drych faltered, moaning softly and sinking toward the ground, trying to shrink into a knot. “They’ll not have you,” I whispered, gently forcing him up again, trying to move him faster through the dark emptiness as the soul-shriveling noise grew close. “I swear to you.”
A quarter of an hour of hard going and I sensed a solid wall looming in front of us. I felt my way along it, searching the brittle edges and rough joinings for the exact spot, speaking the finding words until the cold stone gave way beneath my hand and we almost fell into a narrow passage. I urged Drych deeper into the warren until the hunting cries grew faint again, and we came to the seal of power that kept the first door hidden from those confined to the pits.
“Close your eyes. No one can see us here, so I’m going to make a bit of light.” Only a little, lest I sear his eyes, deprived of light for so many months. The muted gray gleam illuminated a small, circular chamber hewn from ice and stone. Drych leaned against one wall, his head bent almost to his knees, fighting to get enough air while taking only the shallowest of breaths. His emaciated body was bruised and crusted with filth, blood seeping from deep lacerations on his face and back and chest. Claw marks, it appeared. One eye was scarred shut—bum scars—and he held his left arm clamped tightly to his body.
“Two others,” he said between gasps, his good eye squeezed shut. “Don’t know where. Or even if they’re living. Demons tried to make me tell their names. I might have done it; gods forgive me, I don’t even know.”
“You’ve done your best. You’ve not yielded your own name, so I would guess you’ve not yielded anyone else‘s, either.”
“Olwydd is so young, Master, barely nineteen.” Drych himself was no more than twenty-three, though he must be feeling as old as time itself, I knew, after half a year in the pits. “I heard him screaming long ago. Ages ago. Such horrid screams.” Tears rolled from his closed eye, streaking his filthy cheek. “I don’t think he could be alive.”
Damnable dilemma. The howling, though distant, had not stopped, and I well knew the dreadful vengeance the mad demons would inflict on any remaining prisoners. Yet, since I could not understand the terms of my presence or the method of my departure, I dared not risk vanishing before helping at least one of them out. If safety was to be found in Kir‘Vagonoth—and despite my swearing, there was no assurance of that—then I’d best get Drych to it. “I’m going to take you out of here first,” I said. “Find you some help. Then I’ll try to come back for the others. If I can’t do it, it will be up to you, as soon as you’re able.” Of course, first I had to make sure I remembered how to get anyone out of the pits.
The chamber appeared to have no doorway save the one we had come in. But I knew another opening existed, one that led to a steep stairway and into yet another chamber with a portal to the outside world. Concentrate ... think ... remember ... back to the time when you finally realized
that the mad ones could no longer be allowed to roam free and you shaped this place... I traced the threads of memory until I found the right words, and then, with a surge of melydda, I unmasked the seal, a tangle of frosted light set into a frame of ice twice my height. To my dismay I found the seal in tatters—the traces of colored light thin and faded, the enchantments weak or broken. Any of the villainous Gastai who had a dram of sense remaining would be able to walk right through the door. And where were those who should have been maintaining it, the healthy rai-kirah who had volunteered to stay behind and guard this passage? Another job to do before I left Kir‘Vagonoth: seal this opening and find someone to guard it. But first things first.
“Come on, then. Just a little more and you can rest.” I got Drych up the steps and into another chamber, quite like the last, save for a raised black square of stone in its exact center. “Hold onto your stomach,” I said, taking firm hold of the flagging Warden and getting him onto the black stone. “This will be a bit unsettling.”
At my invocation—a demon word that meant “proceed”—we were plunged into a nauseating blur of whirling gray. I pushed forward ten difficult paces. With the eleventh, Drych and I stepped into a snowy wilderness. A blast of frigid wind laced with sleet slammed into us, staggering my companion, raking our exposed skin, threatening to suck the air from our lungs.
Kir‘Vagonoth was the place of our thousand-year exile, a sunless wasteland of constant storms, of unending winter, of savagery and despair that we had shaped into a semblance of life. We had made beauty even in such a place as this. We had survived. With a howl louder than the mad Gastai, the wind tore at my hair and my shirt and spit snow into my eyes, but I would neither cover myself nor bow before it. Rather I let it scour my face, relishing its brutal power, allowing it to feed the pride and anger that threatened to burst the bonds of my flesh. We who had survived here were the true beings, yet we had been discarded like scraps of putrid meat. How had such a travesty come about?
“M-m-master ...” Drych was clothed only in the ragged remnant of a tunic, and the moment’s exposure to the wind had him shivering uncontrollably, his lips and nose quickly taking on the dead white of frostbite.
What had I thought to do with the man? I was here by virtue of his dream, our contact made into flesh by my power and Nyel’s gift. I had no idea of my limits, but logic and instinct told me that they would not encompass taking another being of flesh back with me to Kir‘Navarrin. That meant I had to find out if any rai-kirah survived here besides the mad ones, and if so, to persuade them to care for Drych until an Aife could open a portal to let him out. I needed to find Vallyne, for her power and my castle would be the last stronghold in Kir’Vagonoth. No time to consider the discomfort of such a meeting; poor Drych was freezing. Shaking off my distractions, I shifted quickly to my winged form. “Let’s see if we can find a bit of shelter.”
As if slammed by the wind, Drych fell back against the wall of ice that housed the portal and the gate to the pits and dropped to his knees, his battered mouth working without success to form words, and his dark eyes staring at me with such awe as if he’d seen the heavens open up to swallow him. I couldn’t understand it. He had seen me winged in our last battle and had heard the stories of my change since he was a beginning student. But when I reached out and said I’d carry him for a while so we didn’t have to slog through hip-deep snow to find a place to hide him, I realized that more had changed than wings.
I was on fire, or at least had taken on the appearance of it. Golden light enveloped my entire body, which seemed still to be my own save for a slight increase in bulk and the absence of familiar scars. I could judge these things quite well, as I was now naked save for a sword belt of pale leather. Even the slave mark on my shoulder had vanished. I touched the left side of my face ... no, that one remained. The scaly imprint of falcon and lion on my cheekbone was still cold and dead, as was the long, knotted scar on my right side. But the other marks were gone, and the rest of me was quite warm, despite the radical change in dress.
I shrugged. “I must have done something different in my shifting.” But that wasn’t it. As I hefted the wretched, speechless Drych in my arms and took flight, I considered my shape and tried to slough off the glaring oddities—or at least reshape some clothes—but I could not find the pattern. It was as if instead of imposing an enchantment, I had removed it, as if I wore my own true form and had forgotten the steps needed to modify it. But to investigate such a matter while battling the wind was impossible, burdened as I was with the awkward weight of the young man, and peering through the murk in search of familiar landmarks. First things first.
I flew above the snowy landscape hunting for the houses built by the strongest of the rai-kirah. Though most had been abandoned when we left Kir’ Vagonoth, they should still stand to mark the way. Confusing. I couldn’t find any of them. At last, a broken tower poking up from the snowfields drew me closer to the ground, and I discovered ruins buried under ice and snow. Staying low, I followed a path that told of long months of progressive war and destruction. Eventually I came to the Rudai city, the sprawling shell that we had built in imitation of the cities the Gastai saw on their sojourns in the human world. The towers, temples, walkways, and houses had stood dark and deserted for uncounted years, and remained so—what little of them still existed. The city was rubble. I flew onward, over the long, low workshop buildings where the Rudai circle had shaped everything from chairs to poultry, from gowns to wine to frost-carved roses that did everything but grow. All were now gutted and filled with drifted snow. War had passed over all of this land. Had anything ... anyone survived it?
Apprehensive, I flew on toward the castle I’d had built to house both friends and enemies—friends so I could protect them, enemies so I could watch them. One of my enemies had been left behind when we abandoned Kir‘Vagonoth—Gennod, who had tried to force the joining with the human ... me ... and lead the opening of Kir’Navarrin himself. He had intended to destroy the Ezzarians and free the prisoner in Tyrrad Nor. But I had outma neuvered him and left him imprisoned in the pits with the mad Gastai.
When I saw and felt and heard a whirlwind of darkness on the horizon where I should have seen ice towers piercing the clouds, I thought of the broken door seal on the pits. No Gastai could have wreaked such havoc on all we had built here. Only a Nevai—one of our most powerful circle—could have done so. Gennod was free.
A little further and I glimpsed the castle towers above the whirlwind—one, two, three, at least, still intact. From inside the dark wall of the storm I heard the howling din of full-scale demon battle. “I knew this was too easy,” I said to Drych. “Hold on.” I gathered speed and streaked through the storm, penetrating the black wall. In the murk were beasts of every kind, changing shape even as I passed, clawing each other, flying, wrestling on the ground, their fur or scales or wings whipped by the circling wind. I dodged a dragon’s blast of fire, barely missed having my legs sheared off by razor-edged wings, and then flew high to avoid a pair of bearlike creatures that tore at each other with steel claws. Three slavering wolves charged again and again at a breached wall where a single rai-kirah wearing a human form was trying to keep them back. The defender would not last long without help.
Up and over I flew. Poor Drych whimpered softly as I shot almost straight down into the clear eye of the whirlwind. Half of my castle lay in ruins. What remained was still marvelously beautiful, its icy facets transforming the fires of destruction into jewel-like iridescence. On its highest battlement stood a figure of silver light, her radiance extending a shield of power to protect the citadel. Her golden hair flew free in the wind, and her white gown might have been a creation of swirling snow. As I circled and set my feet on the ice, her green eyes widened in wonder and touched me with true fire.
“My love,” she said. “Oh, my dearest love, how is this possible?” Surprise and disbelief must have shaken her composure. She would never have permitted such warmth to show had she been
given warning of my coming. Her greeting bore no remnant of the fury of our last meeting—when she had cursed me yet again for abandoning her in favor of duty. We had known my choice would mean losing myself in a human soul, and she had sworn never to forgive me. So many years we had loved—
I wrenched myself away from these disturbing thoughts and emotions, the demon’s most private memories ... and instantly felt shamed. Somehow in this dreadful place where Denas had lived and fought and raged against cruel fate, the true horror of what I had done to him for the last year of his existence struck home. I had walled him up in a prison of silence. To crush these last whispers would be murder, as surely as if I had taken my Warden’s knife and plunged it into his heart.
And so I put aside my own guilt and discomfort and set free the buried memories of Vallyne and unfulfilled love, allowing them to flood over me. I touched her face and saw her probing hunger. Oh, gods, a thousand years... But though her gaze searched deep for the passion to match hers, hollow memory was all that remained. All I had to offer was admiration, respect, and the traces of the enchantment she had laid on her captive Warden. I had killed the part of me that might respond. She needed to know the truth.
“I am not the one you think,” I said, unlocking our gaze and crouching down to ease Drych to the ground. “No matter this aura I happen to have acquired. Or rather I am he, as we knew would happen, but I am myself as well. Mostly myself.” The only thing more difficult than defining my state of mind in my own head, was trying to explain it to anyone else—even to Vallyne with whom I had discussed the implications of human joining for a hundred years.
Vallyne folded her arms across her breast and bit her lip, smiling in resigned amusement. Then she walked around me slowly, examining every aspect of my flesh in minute detail. I wondered if the ridiculous rush of blood to my cheeks would be as obvious beneath the gold light I wore. Unlike the immodest Derzhi, Ezzarians usually kept themselves clothed. “You wear the color well,” she said at last, “though your body is not quite so beautiful as the one you ... Denas ... wore in your time here.” Only then did she look me in the eye again, genuine pleasure almost hiding the depths of her sadness. “I am happy to see you, friend Seyonne.”
