Revelation (6 page)

“A nasty one,” I said when her eyelids flicked open. “You may write it down that I freely admit my damned foolishness in attempting it.” Which she would likely do, even though it would be her own admission of excessive pride in not refusing to weave.

“Are you all right?” she said, sitting up under her own power and squeezing her eyes shut against the glare, even while trying to examine me.

“Thanks to you.” When a Warden was in shambles, it was wickedly hard for an Aife to hold a portal. The alternative, of course, was to close the portal and leave the Warden behind in the abyss of a demon-possessed soul—every Warden’s soul-gnawing dread. “Whoa. Stay there. You don’t need to get up. I’ll take care of the cleaning . . . and I promise I’ll do it right. Rest for a while.” I owed her a great deal more than an hour’s ritual.

For once she didn’t argue, though she didn’t sleep, either. She watched my every move as I spent an hour cleaning my weapons, the floor, myself, and even the firepit, carefully reciting each word of the invocations designed to close off any remaining links to the still-active demon.

“So you do know them,” she said as I finished the last words of the endless closing chant used after a lost battle.

“And they don’t burn my tongue or cause my eyes to burn demon-blue. But I would really prefer to be asleep.” I did not retreat to the pallet laid out for me in one of the inner rooms, but stretched out in the shade of the western steps and slept for twelve hours straight. I dreamed of killing.

 

We refused two calls on the next day, though we still did not leave the temple. We slept. Food appeared beside us. We ate and went back to sleep. On the second morning from the lost battle, Ysanne came to talk to Fiona of portals and shaping strategies and other Aife’s business. I did not join them, but sat on the western steps and ate the meat and biscuits and fruit that had been left there for me. When their voices fell silent, I glanced over my shoulder. Ysanne was looking at me through the shady expanse of the temple, her face as expressionless as the stone columns that framed her. I turned back to my breakfast. I didn’t see her again before she left.

“The Queen says there’s another runner on the way,” Fiona said from behind me. “I told her we were well rested. Was I right?”

I worked hard to make sure my voice was composed. “I’m ready.” I wondered if I would ever partner with Ysanne again. I could not imagine it.

“She says the Searcher is in Karn’Hegeth and reports that there is strife among the Derzhi.” Fiona gloated in the report, as if our safety and security were not dependent on the strength of Aleksander’s empire. Whatever people had to say of the Derzhi—and I had as good a reason to hate them as any—it had been the stability of their empire that had allowed us to work successfully for hundreds of years. Aleksander’s guarantee of protection would keep us safe for as long as his family ruled. I had spent more than enough time arguing those points with Fiona months before. But, in fairness, Fiona and the others knew only that the Prince had allowed us to return to Ezzaria in thanks for our help with the Khelid. Ysanne and Catrin alone knew that Ezzaria had been Aleksander’s personal gift to me. None of them could understand the ties that bound the Prince and me.

The runner came shortly. This was a strange case, she said, before going into her trancelike state and relaying the message from our distant countrywoman. The Searcher’s message was garbled, but it seemed quite urgent. All we could gather was that the victim had gone mad and abandoned his wife and children abruptly. With only that much, Fiona and I made our preparations, and as the sun reached the zenith, leaving the temple floor in shadow, I touched the Aife’s hands and began the strangest journey in my experience.

 

 

 

“I am the Warden, sent by the Aife, the scourge of demons, to challenge you for this vessel. Hyssad! Begone, it is not yours.” The demon did not reveal itself, so I had to go hunting.

Such an odd place. Beneath a spinning sky of pale blue and white lay a garden. Every variety of flower, herb, and shrub was growing in it, lush, green, thick-leafed, splashed with every color nature could produce. Growing, fading, dying, then growing again until I was slightly nauseated by the speed of the changes. I strode through the flowers toward the trees—a forest of impossible variety: tall, massive ashes and oaks, flowering fruit trees, spike-leafed nagera trees, like those that grew near the deep wells and springs of the Azhaki desert, pines and firs and spruce of varieties familiar only to those hardy enough to live in the highest mountains beyond Capharna. Leaves of bright yellow and red mixed in with the liveliest spring greens. And all of it changing as I walked, the fire-red maple leaves falling alongside drifting pear blossoms.

I could discover nothing but this bizarre forest-scape for quite a long time. A brook gurgled alongside the path. Hoping it was the thread that would lead me to my quarry, I followed it, pushing through increasingly dense underbrush, hacking at the thick growth with the silver knife I had changed into a scythe . . . and came near toppling off the edge of a cliff. The forest stopped abruptly at the edge of a fifty-story drop to a forested valley. As I paused to let my transforming enchantment give me wings to explore beyond the cliff edge, a path shaped itself from the steep rock wall like a sand-snake shaking off its gritty coating. I thought the path might be Fiona’s doing. An Aife could feel obstacles and could attempt to remedy them through some shaping of the landscape she held in her mind. A tricky business, as she could not see the Warden and risked dropping him over a cliff or into a pit or impaling him on a tree. Ysanne could do such things because she could sense from my mind what I needed
. Oh, my love . . .

The wave of piercing grief came unbidden . . . unwanted. This was not the place. I marshaled my concentration and started down the path. Into a fertile valley, still of confused season. Trees taller than Derzhi palaces . . . ferns the size of houses . . . black-centered red flowers with a thick, cloying scent that made me dizzy.

“Hyssad! Begone!” I yelled it out when I detected a movement from ahead of me, across the bend of a wide, sluggish river. I whirled about at the sound of a footstep behind me. Sweat beaded on my brow. Where was the demon? I could get no sense of it. Yet something was close. What was wrong with my perceptions?

A gust of hot, humid wind stirred the brooding trees and raised up a cloud of insects. The cry of a bird echoed in the distance. A trailing vine tickled my neck, and I slashed at it with my sword, furling my wings tighter as the trees grew thicker. I could have sworn I heard a laugh. “Hyssad!”

“Are you a bird or one of these nattering creatures that annoys my ears?” The voice came from above me, somewhere atop a pair of shiny black boots. “And you keep saying that vile word. I do wish you’d stop.”

I moved backward and promptly tripped over a protruding root that had not been across the path when I had passed a moment before. My sword was ready as I scrambled to my feet, sure the beast would pounce upon my clumsiness.

“Put it away. I have no argument with you.” The boots dropped from the tree in a shower of red and gold leaves, bringing with them the image of a slender, fair-haired man of middle age with a cocky smile. His blond beard was neatly trimmed, his hands well formed and clean. He wore a shirt and trousers of deep-hued blue and purple, and a gray-green cloak that shimmered like water in the dappled sunlight. He carried no weapons that I could see. “So which are you, bird or flea? Surely you can’t be the one I was warned of.” He twirled a finger, and the trees shifted back far enough that he could walk around me. I turned with him, my knife, now a sword, at the ready. “Now, stop that. How am I to learn of you if you’ll not be still and let me look?” He set his hands on his hips and laughed, yet the sound of it did not eat away at my ears and my soul as demon laughter always did.

Verbal bantering with a demon, no matter how monstrous or commonplace its form was never wise. Nothing would come of it. Words were only a distraction. So I waited. The demon watched me, leaning his back against a moss-covered tree trunk and chewing on a long blade of grass. He didn’t seem in any hurry. I waved my sword tip at him in tight circles, trying to tease his eye as I stepped closer, but I felt ridiculous when he reached out and stopped the movement of the blade with his hand, then jerked backward.

“Ouch!” He stuck his finger in his mouth. “That’s wicked. Are you really intending to poke that into me?” He looked down at his flat stomach and laid his other hand on it. “Wouldn’t feel pleasant at all. Can’t we just skip it?”

“We can certainly skip it, but only if you leave this vessel.”
Patience. Don’t be drawn in.

“Ah, he does say something other than the words that burn the ear. But the sentiment is the same. Leave, begone, hyssad.” He cringed and shuddered dramatically when he said the last, the word in his own demon tongue that those of his kind could not ignore. “But I don’t want to go. I like it here, I’m learning a lot, and this”—He waved his hand to encompass land and sky and trees—“this ‘vessel,’ as you call it—quite rudely I might add—doesn’t seem to mind me being here. Why would I want to leave?”

“It is not your choice to stay. Only to leave or die.”
Don’t argue. He’s trying to lure you into distraction.

“No. Not acceptable at all. You must give me some other choice.”

“There is no other. Leave or die.” I stood ready, but, before I could blink, we were in an entirely different place. A city . . . deserted, a mournful wind nosing a battered, empty pot through the dirt streets and whining through burned-out buildings. Bones littered a crumbling marketplace, and a tattered flag fluttered defiantly from a pole held by a skeletal hand. My skin shriveled, especially the scar on my face that was the same print of falcon and lion as the emblem on the flag. Aleksander’s flag—the lion of the Derzhi and the falcon of his Denischkar house.

“What is this?” In my surprise I violated my so recently professed maxim.

“I thought it might suit you better. You were so grim in the other place. ‘Leave or die.’ So unfriendly. This is where such sentiments take you . . . into the realm of one . . . Unnamed.” A whisper of frost brushed across my soul. “Not a nice place at all. No, indeed.”

“I am not here to be friends with you.”

“Then, kill me if you must. We’re getting nowhere.” He sat down cross-legged between the wheels of an overturned cart and ripped open the filmy purple shirt to bare a most humanlike chest. But he looked down at it and ran his long fingers over the skin. “On second thought . . .”

My stomach heaved as the landscape changed again. This time it was Catrin’s practice arena, with the same strip of bright sunshine along one side that I had seen two weeks earlier. The slender demon had a sword in his hand and brandished it wildly, much in the way of one of Catrin’s newer students. “All right. Come at me!”

He was pulling things out of my own head. I backed away, trying to forge new mental barriers, while coming up with something to explain how he was doing it. No luck at either task. Most unsettling.

“Not so bold now, eh? I can give you more of a fight than you think.” And in a flurry of blows so quick I missed seeing them, he nicked the top of my right ear, my left shoulder, and my right knee, and left a five-mezzit slash in the toe of one boot. Before I could strike back, he sat down in the middle of the arena thirty paces away from me and laid his sword down crossways in front of him. “Why don’t we talk?”

“You must leave this vessel. This is not your place. Whatever you are, you don’t belong here.”

“Doubts are terrible things. They twist your gut in a knot. Surprised that I know of them? My own, not just yours. Surprised that I have them? Doubt is the enemy of the . . . Warden . . . that’s what you call yourself. I’ve been told of Wardens and the Aife, the scourge . . . warned to watch out for them . . . for you in particular. The Warden who changes himself. The one who is different from all who have come before. I thought I would come see for myself. A number of my cohorts have no use for you.”

I was not going mad. The demon was toying with me . . . or perhaps I had already fought and was injured. What to do? Retreat? Kill it? It wouldn’t leave, therefore I was required to kill it. But it was inordinately strange. Every sense I used to search out demons must be dead. No demon music, no creeping dread, no smell of rot, of corruption, of secret foulness that could be detected behind the fair appearance. No wonder he could get inside my head; he displayed nothing that would trigger my defenses. Yet he was a demon. There was no other possibility. The Searcher had detected it through the signs of possession. Twenty-six tests they used to judge. And what else could he be?

“Contemplation. Surely that’s a good sign. Shall I tell you how I come to be here? If you would sheathe that ugly weapon, or lay it out as I’ve done, then we could share a tale or two. I want to know why the scourge of demons wants to send me back with my mind shredded, when I’ve only just come and have done no harm.”

Only one way to be sure. Dangerous to expose one’s own soul when beyond the portal. The protective barriers one built through long training were already precariously thin when walking the landscape of another’s soul. But I needed something to bring me back to my purpose. An anchor. Surety. And so I crouched down in the dirt in front of the slender figure, and I looked in its eyes . . . and with every scrap of melydda I could gather, I saw true. The fair and pleasant gentleman who sat in front of me with his head cocked and his brow drawn up in puzzled curiosity was indeed the manifestation of a rai-kirah. But in all the truth of my seeing, there was no evil in him.

Impossible! Now surely I ought to kill it. Any rai-kirah that could so confuse a Warden’s senses signified such a change . . . such danger that I could not even calculate it. Yet I had come upon other impossibilities in my life. What could be more unlikely than the mark of the gods I had found in Aleksander?