The Night Parade h-4

by Scott Ciencin

  "I don't know," he whispered in anguish. "I can still feel it, do you understand? My hand, the one that is gone, I can still feel it."

  She leaned forward and kissed the gauntlet. "Surrender your avenging sword, Erin. You have done enough. Your reward has come. Do not torture yourself anymore."

  "Am I dying?" he asked dully.

  "Yes. A clot of blood is racing to your brain. Your wounds were more severe than you knew. In moments your life will pass. Please, Erin," she said as she bit her lip, "You cannot face what comes next if you are determined to bring the tools of slaughter with you."

  Shandower stared at the skin surrounding the base of the gauntlet. The weave of flesh connecting the two was coming apart, and suddenly his hand was no longer fused to the weapon. "Take it off for me," he said in desperation, "Hurry!"

  Mahrissah did as he asked, her eyes alight with rapture as she discarded the weapon and allowed the bare flesh of his hand to close around hers. Suddenly her grip became too tight and she said, "Watch my eyes, Erin, and see the truth."

  Within her eyes he saw a particular patch of darkness, which the light had not been able to ward off, a tiny splash of shadow that threatened to grow and fill the canvas of his thoughts with nightmares engineered to drive him to the point of madness and beyond.

  "Kill yourself," a voice whispered from the darkness.

  Shandower rose and walked to a display of edged weapons he had collected from the corpses of the monsters he had killed. His fingers were inches from the hilt of a dagger, which he planned to ram into his own throat, when he identified the owner of that voice.

  By then it was too late.

  Seventeen

  Myrmeen found Krystin sitting at the edge of the pit where Shandower had secreted the apparatus. Her long legs hung over the edge and she kicked absently as if she were trying to swim through the darkness that seemed to rise from below. Myrmeen sat beside her, tucking her legs beneath her, afraid of the abyss waiting beyond the shaft's cleanly polished lip.

  The locket was in Krystin's hand, and she stared at its emerald surface in frustration. "So close," she whispered. "I'm sorry?" Myrmeen asked. "I didn't hear you." "Nothing," Krystin said as she slipped the locket into her breast pocket and looked at Myrmeen with eyes that mirrored the older woman's sadness and exhaustion.

  They sat quietly, appreciating each other's company, when a sudden flicker of memory came to Myrmeen, chilling her. "By the gods," she whispered. "What's wrong?" Krystin asked.

  Myrmeen hesitated, then decided she would never keep secrets from Krystin again. Haltingly, she began her story.

  "Fourteen years ago I did something terrible. It was the night of the great storm. I guess I was delirious with pain. I couldn't think clearly. I know that's no excuse, but-"

  "Go on," Krystin urged.

  "It was a few seconds after the delivery. My mind was swimming. Dak said the baby was gone. In that moment, a nightmare came to me. I saw a madwoman in red carrying her dead child in her arms. The woman wailed her agony for all to hear as she shambled through the streets. She begged anyone who came close to her for the smallest gesture of reassurance, a hint of kindness, a compliment for the noisome, bloated body she cradled in her arms.

  " 'My child,' the woman whispered, 'my child is beautiful.'

  "But it wasn't a nightmare. I had seen that scarlet woman wandering the marketplace when I was a little girl. A handful of drunken guards, evil men, all of them, had threatened to arrest her for making a public spectacle of herself-and, more importantly, for frightening off the tourists and their much needed gold.

  "The woman had ignored them, and finally a guard snatched the corpse from her hands and threw it to one of his comrades. The scarlet woman chased after her child, but it was kept out of her reach. When she attacked one of the men, clawing at him with her bony hands, her fingernails scraped away, the guard ran her through and left her to die slowly in an alley. He stood there and waited until she was dead before he gave her back the child."

  Myrmeen shuddered at the horror of that distant morning. She looked at Krystin. "Dak told me you were gone, and all I could think about was the scarlet woman. I suppose I thought that if I had seen the baby, I would have become her. My sanity would have been lost, so I didn't ask to see the baby. I just let it go.

  "I made a mistake, a horrible mistake. I allowed my fear to overtake me. If I hadn't, I might have saved you."

  "Or you might have died in the attempt," Krystin said. "Besides, you don't know for sure that I'm your daughter."

  Myrmeen thought about her next words carefully, afraid to say the first thing that came to her mind. That doesn't matter, she wanted to say, but she knew those words would ring false, because it mattered to a great degree. There was something, however, that had equal importance.

  "Krystin, all I can say is that if something were to happen to you, I would feel as if I had lost my daughter a second time."

  The young woman stared at Myrmeen in shock. She was unprepared for such an admission and had no idea how to react. With a cry of longing, Krystin threw her arms around Myrmeen and began to weep.

  Myrmeen's arms closed over Krystin, gently caressing her hair and the flowing line of her back. She told Krystin how their lives would be in Arabel, of the palace they would live in, the luxury and splendor, the people who would be her friends, the subjects who would adore her. "An education," Myrmeen said excitedly, "a proper one. The finest tutors, only the best. You will have everything you want. Everything."

  Krystin pulled back slowly and Myrmeen wiped away the child's tears. "It sounds wonderful."

  "It will be," Myrmeen promised. "Believe me, it will."

  Krystin touched Myrmeen's hand. "You're shaking."

  The older woman rose and kissed Krystin on the forehead. "I need to talk with Reisz and Ord. Then I'm going to get some sleep. Will you be all right here?"

  "Yes, Myrmeen," she said, fighting back the urge to call the magnificent woman before her by the name they both desperately needed to hear: "Mother." Instead, she said something that rocked them both even more. "I love you."

  Myrmeen dropped to her knees and hugged Krystin so tightly that she feared she would hurt the girl. "Sweet dreams," she said as she pulled away and covered her face with her hands to mask the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she walked away. She found the tunnel that led to the chamber shared by the Harpers, and disappeared from view, leaving only the slight echo of her boots on the stone floor in her wake.

  Krystin sat alone, waiting for the sudden wave of sickness that had overcome her to pass. When she no longer felt the pain behind her eyes, and when the cold, metallic taste in her mouth finally vanished, Krystin removed the heavy, dead weight of the locket from her blouse and stared at its seductive, gleaming emerald surface.

  There was a good reason why she could not call Myrmeen her mother: It would have been a lie.

  Lord Sixx had helped her remember the truth, unlocking her buried memories with his power. It was a simple enough task, considering he was the one who planted her false memories in the first place. Exposure to the magic of the apparatus, when she took Shandower's hand in the safe house to prove that she was not a member of the Night Parade, had created fissures in the walls that Sixx had erected in her mind. Through those cracks had come glimpses of her true life, memories of friends and family.

  A part of her had feared that these new memories could also be a lie, and so during the ride to Shandower's retreat, Krystin had spoken to the assassin several times, making excuses to be near him. She had found reasons to take his hand in hers, allowing the gauntlet's energy to course through her. This time, the magic had not affected her. Although Sixx had not restored all he had taken when his emissaries had kidnapped her and arranged for the desert slavers to find her, these memories were true, and he had promised that once the apparatus was in his hands, he would restore all her memories.

  The images that had been haunting her were so easily explained that t
hey almost appeared to be mundane facts glimpsed on a tired afternoon rather than sleek, sharp-as-steel revelations cutting across her darkened field of memory like swords meeting, their metal crashing during a death duel, the rain of sparks adding much needed illumination.

  Her life, all the gods help her, had been dull.

  Her name was Krystin Devlaine. She had never been a hunter for the Night Parade. In fact, she had never known that such creatures existed outside of tales she had heard in harsh whispers at the boarding school where she had been sent by her parents. Those stories were generally used to frighten the younger children who believed in all manner of haunts and demons who knew their names and would come for them if they misbehaved.

  The kindly old man she had glimpsed had been her grandfather, who had died several years ago. He had lived in Calim-port and had visited her much more frequently than her own mother and father, who were restless travelers and explorers. They had relegated the task of raising Krystin to others for most of her life. The vulgar, dark-haired man with rotted teeth, who had tried to club her with a shattered table leg, had been a nameless drunk in a tavern. She had crept away from the school and had been trapped in the bar when a brawl erupted. Physical fitness had been stressed at the school, and she had been an especially apt pupil during the lessons on self-defense. Those hours of instruction had benefited her that night. She had crushed the man's instep, left him howling in pain, and ran from the tavern with a strange girl she had met, a homeless child.

  Melaine.

  That night had been her only true evening of adventure until she was snatched by the Night Parade. The false memories Sixx had implanted had given her a sense of bravado that had accounted for her unbearable ego, her prickly nature, and her caustic tongue. They also had made her so much like Myrmeen that it was not surprising that there had been tension between them from the outset.

  Sixx also had briefly tasted Myrmeen's memories on one of the woman's first nights in the city. It had been after Myrmeen's narrow escape from death at Kracauer's "orphanage." Sixx had been disgusted with Zeal's decision to leave the humans alive, and so he had gone to Myrmeen's quarters to finish the Harpers himself. He had found Myrmeen sitting before her open window, sound asleep. He had entered her mind to kill her, but soon reversed that decision when he learned who she was and the power she had at her command.

  Shandower's first instinct had been correct: Sixx had placed Krystin with the Harpers in the hope of eventually gaining control of Arabel through the girl, when she succeeded her "mother," who would die from an accident they would arrange in a few years. Sixx had not revealed all of this to Krystin, but he had shown her enough so that she could fit all the pieces into place.

  But Lord Sixx had refused to give her all of her memories back, and she knew there must have been a reason beyond the one he had given; there was something he did not want her to know, a part of her past that he did not want her to see.

  "Your parents are alive," he had said within her mind. "Once they know you have disappeared, they will search for you. I can lead you to them. I can give your life back to you, child."

  "What about your plans for Arabel?" she had asked.

  "It would probably have been more trouble than it was worth. And the apparatus is far more important to me. Work with me and the humans will live. Defy me and they will die, even Mistress Lhal."

  Suddenly, Krystin felt a sharp pain in her leg, as if she had been bitten by an insect. The sensation had shaken her from her memory and she brushed at her leg absently.

  Staring into the locket's emerald depths, Krystin realized that the bauble somehow had acquired the power to reflect her memories, thoughts, and dreams. There had been one last set of images that had not been explained by the revelations caused by Lord Sixx's magic, memories of figures chasing her. She cleared her mind and began to concentrate on them.

  Time slowly drifted past and soon she found herself staring at movement within the locket's surface. Krystin stared at the images and allowed the world around her to fall away. She saw a half dozen men chasing her down an alley, vengeful, evil men who were quickly gaining on her. As Krystin concentrated more deeply, she was able to see that they wore uniforms: their leathers were black and on their breasts they wore the insignia of a company, a silver dagger dripping with blood.

  Suddenly her view of the world altered with dizzying speed.

  She saw the wall to her left flash by and suddenly she was staring at the other end of the alley, where three more men waited. All movement stopped. Krystin became aware of a woman's sharp breath coming in gasps. The men closed more slowly now, enjoying the terror they inspired.

  Her world view shifted again, this time jerking upward sharply and spinning in a wide arc. The opposing wall came into view and she was turned once again and lowered gently to the ground. A woman, her face too close to be seen properly, kissed her once, then withdrew and faced her assailants.

  Krystin's vantage point was close to the ground and she felt as if she were watching the dance of giants. The dark-haired woman who had set her down drew a blade and lunged at the closest of the men. To her credit, she wounded three men before they ran her through.

  Suddenly a sword was buried in the soft earth before her. In the reflection of the metal she saw that she was perhaps a year old, no more. A baby. One of the men reached down, picked her up, and laughed. He spoke, but his words were gibberish. Beyond him, she could see another man holding up his empty gold purse, making a joke she could not understand. Suddenly her attention was riveted on a prize that hung around the neck of the man holding her, an object that he had taken from the woman he had killed: A beautiful emerald pendant.

  The images suddenly dissolved.

  Krystin once again sat on the edge of the shaft in Erin Shan-dower's cavernous retreat. She looked down at the locket in disgust, then hurled it into the darkness below. She thought she heard it strike the side of the tunnel, but there was no sound to signify that it had reached the bottom. No matter. The locket was gone, but its terrible gift had remained behind and would never leave her.

  Myrmeen Lhal was not her mother. The Devlaines were not her true parents. She was, in truth, an orphan, with more in common with the Krystin Lord Sixx unwittingly had manufactured than she ever would have guessed.

  She had to tell Myrmeen, had to warn her that she had betrayed them to the Night Parade, that time was short. But she could not make herself move. Her limbs were too sluggish to respond to her mental commands, and when she tried to rise, she nearly toppled into the pit. She fell back, darkness stealing over her. She was unaware that the deep, thin wound in her leg from the "insect" that had bitten her was now black and swollen. As her consciousness faded, she glimpsed a single nightmarish flash of the creature that had inflicted the wound as it climbed out over the lip of the pit, the emerald locket caught in its vicelike pincers.

  Within seconds, Krystin was unconscious. If she had remained awake for another few moments, she would have been witness to a sight that was at once horrifying and beautiful. Where a monstrosity had been only moments before now stood a tall, lithe woman with long, dark hair and an ethereal beauty.

  Widow Tamara, the Weaver, stopped before the sleeping girl. Her poison snaked through the child's system, incapacitating her without stopping her heart. She had no quarrel with Krystin. Tamara went down the corridor where she had heard Myrmeen walk some time earlier. The child's locket was clutched in her hand. She smiled and hurried to the long overdue reunion that she had left Calimport to experience.

  Less than five minutes earlier, Erin Shandower had heard a voice that had nearly driven him to suicide before he identified its owner. He turned and was startled to see the familiar, gaunt face of a man he had presumed dead.

  "Lucius!" Shandower said as he rushed to the mage, whose white smock was covered in blood from his wounds. Lucius Cardoc stood with open arms and buckling legs. Shandower caught the mage as he fell to his bed. The sorcerer's eyes lolled back in his head
; his lips trembled.

  Shandower suddenly realized his mistake. "You're-you're not breathing."

  Lucius looked up at him with a sad, tortured expression, a deep, powerful sympathy in his eyes. The lanterns Shandower had lighted started to dim, the candles dying one by one. Suddenly the room was wreathed in shadows. From the darkness Shandower heard skittering and laughter.

  Turning, he found a man he had never seen standing between him and the gauntlet, which he had allowed his dead lover to remove from him earlier. In a startling moment of complete lucidity, Shandower understood that it had been Lucius who had appeared to him, Lucius using his magic because the sorceries of the Night Parade would be worthless against him as long as he wore the gauntlet. Lucius had betrayed them, but why he had done so was a mystery to the assassin, and would remain as such.

  "Greetings," Lord Sixx said with a smile. Shandower tried to dart past the Night Parade leader, but Lord Sixx grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. He repeated the maneuver several times until Shandower was delirious with pain, the stump of his arm bleeding from the impact.

  "We found your ally trying to follow you. He died during questioning, but I was determined not to let that stop our little game," Lord Sixx said as several figures strode forward from the shadows. They were misshapen figures that would never be taken for human, even in silhouette. Lord Sixx looked over his shoulder and said, "This is the man who has killed so many of your brethren!"

  The creatures advanced in a murderous frenzy, halting only when Lord Sixx held out his free hand to order them back. Shandower glimpsed the deformities of the first few monsters and thought he might gag in disgust.

  "Now," Lord Sixx said, "you can tell me what you've done with the apparatus, or you can tell them."

  Shandower anxiously looked over Sixx's shoulder, then whispered, "Go back to whatever hell you came from."

  "I would, but I'm not welcome there anymore," Lord Sixx said as he flung Shandower with inhuman strength toward the monstrosities. They reached out for him with claws and tentacles, the razor-sharp teeth in their eye sockets grinding in anticipation. Shandower tried to scream as he was dragged into the shadows, but something cold and wet was jammed deep into his throat, preventing him from warning the others. Lord Sixx sighed as he watched his minions consume the man.