Revelation (3 page)

As she took the cup away, Catrin pressed a finger to her mouth and shook her head slightly. But the seed of anger, planted in me when Fiona took up her watch, began to grow as if watered by Catrin’s tea.

“And she tries to play this game with me. Am I to convince myself that I didn’t use my power to see that we had made a son? Am I to go through the rest of my life pretending I didn’t feel his heart beating? I can’t do it, Catrin. We gloried in the wonder of a life created from love and faithfulness, and now she says I can’t even grieve. My wife has murdered my son, and I am not to take note of the fact?”

Catrin sat on the floor in front of me. In the corner behind her was the plain gray block of her mourning stone, its nine candles lit to warm the spirits of her grandfather and her long dead parents. I had interrupted her afternoon meditation. My friend and mentor took my hands in her own. “You’ve been asleep, Seyonne. Dreaming terrible dreams. As I told you earlier, I can do nothing for dreams.”

So Catrin, too, had decided to live the lie. But she placed a finger on my lips before I could protest. “Now you must think of something else for a while,” she said. “A message has come in from a Searcher in Capharna. They’ll be ready three hours from now. Can you fight? Have you rested enough?”

It took me a moment to comprehend. The rest of the world had faded into insignificance beside the devastation of my family. “Fight?” A demon battle. The net of enchantment that Ezzaria strung through the world had snagged another demon. I stared at her in disbelief. How could anyone think I could fight on this day?

“Fiona says it’s a wicked situation, a slave merchant. If you can’t do it . . . ”

Why this one of all days? I closed my eyes and tried to draw myself together. There was no one else. “No. No, of course I’ll do it.” Three hours. Barely enough time to prepare. Dismal life would have to wait. “If you could just help me with this. . . .” I removed one sleeve of my shirt and had her loosen the tight bandage Ysanne had put on my shoulder. Better to risk a little bleeding than restrict my movements.

After she had rebandaged my shoulder and made me eat a plateful of cold meat, Catrin laid her small, strong hand on my head. “You’ll have help soon. Three months and we’ll have Tegyr and Drych ready for their testing. And Gryffin sends word from the east that Emrys and Nestayo will be ready soon after. You’ve done marvels with them, Seyonne. You’re an exceptional teacher.” But her kindness rang hollow.

“It’s not enough, is it? After this no one will believe I’m uncorrupted. They’ll say I’ve brought a demon into the Queen’s house. Into the Queen’s body.”

Catrin sighed in exasperation and shook my head with a handful of my hair. “Be careful in this battle, my first and most prized pupil.” I looked up at her and realized she was not referring only to the combat of the next few hours. The sentiment made more sense when I kissed her cheek and stepped out of her door to find Fiona sitting on the steps. My watchdog would have heard every word we’d said.

I did not trust myself to speak to Fiona, so I strode out through the woods toward the temple, trying to decide what I might do when the battle was over. It was no use attempting to settle my mind about things. That was going to be a longer ordeal than the time I had available at the moment. All I could hope for was to come up with some step I could take that would begin to set life back in order. I couldn’t think of a single one.

 

Ezzarian temples were simple stone structures built in deep forests whose richness seemed to strengthen our power. They were scattered throughout Ezzaria, always similar in appearance: a roofed circle of five pairs of white fluted columns, rising from a floor of polished stone. In the center were a few small, enclosed rooms, but most of the place was open to the wind and weather. The temple floor was inlaid with mosaics depicting events in our history, and in its open expanse were a fire pit and a low stone platform where we would place the victim on the rare occasion the person was brought to us. Most often the victim was in some distant city or village in the care of an Ezzarian Comforter. The Comforter was a channel; he would lay hands upon the victim and spin out a simple line of strong enchantment that would reach all the way to the Aife in the temple.

Since I was the only Warden who had survived the Derzhi conquest and the Khelid conspiracy, this particular temple was the only one in use. A temple aide had made the place ready for our coming venture. Beside the fire where Fiona and I would join our magic and make the attempt, the aide had laid out a white robe for Fiona and a brass jar filled with jasnyr leaves. Accompanied by a proper enchantment, jasnyr would make the neatly laid fire in the pit burn long and true, and prevent its smoke from stinging the eyes. Too, the Scroll of the Rai-kirah said that jasnyr was abhorrent to demons. In the preparation room—an empty, unadorned room in the center of the stone building—the aide would have set out a pitcher of water for drinking, a basin of water for washing, a clean drying cloth, a set of clean clothes made to fit me, my dark blue Warden’s cloak, and the wooden box with the knife and the mirror.

I had to wait for Fiona before beginning my preparation. She needed to tell me more about the victim, and I would be unable to speak to her once I was prepared. So I sat on the temple steps and watched the sun settle beyond the trees. I almost laughed. If Ysanne had never been with child, then why was Fiona my partner for this battle?

“Are you ready to fight again so soon, Master Seyonne?” Fiona arrived more quickly than I had expected. She stood in front of me, her whole posture a reproach, as if my sitting down were just another of my crimes.

She was not unpleasant to look on, small, slim, her dark, straight hair kept short—unusual for Ezzarian women, who favored single braids or long falls of hair caught with flowers or woven ribbons. She disdained skirts and dresses in favor of full-sleeved shirts and breeches, but one could not say she dressed like a man, for there was no mistaking the womanly aspect to her slender figure. The costume looked natural on her. Ysanne had told me that many of the young women who had spent the years of Derzhi occupation hiding in the forest preferred to dress in that fashion. They’d had no materials to make clothes, and so they had taken what they could find on the fallen bodies of our countrymen and in the abandoned cottages they passed as they fell back deep into the trees. They had become accustomed to the freedom of movement men’s clothes afforded them.

“Catrin told me this is a slave merchant,” I said.

“Yes. He’s recently begun specializing in young girls, selling them to Derzhi nobles . . .”

The disgust in her voice when she spoke of the Derzhi was a continuing indictment of me, who dared call one of the despised conquerors my friend. She proceeded to tell me of the horrors the merchant had committed, and of what the Searcher had found out about his life. Clearly he was no innocent taken by a hungering demon to be devoured quickly, but rather one who was a source of longtime sustenance for his resident rai-kirah. Such long-nurtured demons were the most difficult to root out.

“You seem distracted, Master Seyonne. Perhaps we should call this off.”

“And leave this rai-kirah to its work?”

“We cannot right every wrong in the world.”

“If you had lived in the world, you could not say that so easily. Let’s get on with it.”

She nodded, gazing reproachfully at the scar on my face—the royal falcon and lion that had been burned into my left cheekbone on the day I was sold to Aleksander. “As you say. You’ll not forget the purification in your preparation?”

I forced myself patient. “I have never forgotten the purification, Fiona.”

“Hammard found the towel dry yesterday. If you had washed—”

“I need no teaching in how to wash myself, nor do I have to justify the weather. If you remember, the afternoon was hot. I did not use the towel. Has Hammard nothing better to do than examine my towels?”

Fiona glared at me. “You skip steps in the rites. They are there for a reason. If you were sincere in your intent, you’d do things correctly.”

I would not get into an argument with her over my sincerity. If two hundred demon encounters in a year were not sincere enough, then no words were going to convince her. I needed to be at peace. “If there’s nothing else. . . .”

“I had to clean the knife again after you left last night.”

My irritation bristled into true anger. “You have no business touching the knife. You overstep yourself, Fiona.” The enchantments on the Warden’s knife were very precise and not completely understood. We had learned how to duplicate them through the years, but we did not know what might affect their peculiar magic. The knife was the only weapon a Warden could take beyond the Aife’s portal. Every other would disintegrate in your hand. We dared not tamper with it.

“But you had—”

“It was perfectly clean. If you touch it again, I will insist on your replacement.”

Though she set her jaw defiantly, she knew she had gone too far, for she didn’t take time to list the other hundred things she had planned to accuse me of.

“We’d best make ready,” I said. “I’ll need an hour and a half, as usual.” I had a feeling that a hundred hours weren’t going to put me in the proper state of calm readiness I needed. I left her there, holding her robe and glaring after me in the waning light.

As always, I worked for an hour at the kyanar, the martial exercises that helped center my thoughts and prepare my body for the coming confrontation. On that night, for the first time in my career as a Warden of Ezzaria, I thought that the combat beyond the portal might be a relief.

By the time Fiona came for me, robed in plain, shapeless white as ritual specified, I had washed myself, drunk most of the clean water in the pitcher, donned the clothes, the Warden’s cloak, and the weapons, and used Ioreth’s Chant to put myself into a state halfway between the world we walked and the one the Aife would create for me. The rite was immensely calming, and despite my distress, I felt quite capable of the focus necessary to do my job. Fiona led me to the temple fire, and when I nodded that I was ready, she took my hands and worked her awesome magic.

To anyone who watched, it would seem that I had vanished from the temple, yet I could see it behind me, a pale outline against the bright stars of the Ezzarian night. Before me was another place . . . of rocks, earth, water, and air to breathe . . . and a rai-kirah waiting—a demon, who might appear in any of a million different shapes.

When I stepped through the misty gray rectangle that was Fiona’s portal there were no whispered words of comfort or well-wishing. And once I was through and the house-sized man-thing with four arms and daggerlike fangs dropped instantly on my back, I had no time to think of Ysanne or Fiona or anything else. I could not see the landscape, could not assess the possibilities for disposing of the leather-hided creature, could not do anything but keep my vital parts away from the fangs and keep moving fast enough that it could not grab me with its multiple limbs. I had only enough breath to get out half the words of the warning I was required to give. “I am the Warden, sent by . . . Aife . . . the scourge . . . demons . . . challenge you . . . this vessel. Hyssad! Begone. Not yours.” It did not deign to answer me, only devoted itself more devoutly to removing my head.

And so I fought. Untold hours. Whenever I would gain the advantage, it pulled away and I had to give chase, losing it in a murky wasteland until it pounced again. The place was dreadfully cold. I hated the hot places, but the cold ones were more dangerous. Cramps and stiffening muscles that could tear easily. Numbness, so you felt the touch of claw or steel too late. Sluggish senses. I was slathered in green blood that ate into my skin like cold fire, and the wound in my shoulder was bleeding again. Then my eyes began playing tricks on me.

As I plunged my blade into a gaping orifice that was spewing venom, I caught the glint of metal. Steel bands appeared about my wrists. I jerked my hands away from the monster, but the flat rings did not disappear . . .

. . .
slave rings . . . and my hands were not my own. They were slender young hands . . . a girl’s hands . . . and the monster was not a misshapen manifestation of demon life, but a slack-jawed man with eyes that devoured me with imaginings of unholy pleasure. He licked his lips . . . and his tongue came toward my face . . .

With disgust and fury I lashed out, trying to banish the images of the evil this soul had wrought. But one after another they came upon me in all their terror, pain, shame, and degradation. I lived those children’s horror as I fought, unable to see the monstrous limbs or sharpened fangs because of the visions that clouded my sight. I had to fight with senses that were not sight, to guide my hands and feet with the remembrance of the bestial form, not allowing myself to be misled by the evidence of my eyes. And when I at last plunged my dagger into the living center of the demon shape, I was so outraged at the violation of those children, that I made a terrible mistake.

When its physical manifestation dies, the rai-kirah is set loose. The Warden must discern the position of the demon as it leaves the dead hulk, and use the Luthen mirror to paralyze it, giving it the choice to leave the host or die. But on that day, once I had the demon trapped, I gave it no choice. I killed it, not in sober judgment, but in rage, and I killed it so violently and so viciously that I killed the victim, too.

Whatever land and sky had existed around me dissolved instantly into chaos. A whirlwind of darkness streaked with garish colorings, a nauseating disorientation as up and down, left and right, lost all meaning. I struggled to keep my own body from being ripped apart in the tumult, and I lunged for the gray portal, shimmering, wavering at my back . . .