Immediate wrath swiftly transformed into speculation. “You should have dealt with them already.”
He inclined his head. “They are your men; I would not harm them intentionally.”
The jansu shifted closer. His free hand stroked Sherakai’s jaw. “You love me so?”
Another trap… Whether he told the truth or a lie, it would cost him. The jansu’s intimate proximity made it difficult to think quickly. He wanted to step away but, again, risked giving insult. Bairith might not see his expression, but he could sense emotions. Sherakai focused on the breaths that carried the scent of sweet cicely in and out, in and out…
“Is it such a challenging question?” the jansu whispered. His own breath, warm and soft, feathered Sherakai’s skin.
“No, lord,” he answered with gratifying calm. “I feel very little about anything.”
“Or anyone?”
He let silence answer for him and did not flinch as Bairith placed a tender kiss on his cheek, then stepped away. As he did, Sherakai’s vision shifted. A growl formed at the back of his throat, but it did not exit his mouth.
“What do you feel?”
He took the offered diversion. “I am more aware of the spirits around me now, even without using the magic.”
“Interesting. Do they interfere?”
“They are simply there. Like… flies, but I can’t touch them.” It followed, in his mind, that they couldn’t touch him, either.
“Are there any physical changes? Like horns? Scales? Alterations in your limbs?” To temper the awfulness such a thing suggested, he offered a sweet smile.
Sherakai did not. “No one has said anything. I’ve noticed nothing when I bathe.” Gods knew he looked every time. He could not escape the memory of Fesh and Teth’s twisted bodies, nor the casual comment from the soldiers about other freaks.
He was a freak.
“You will tell me at once if there are.”
From the arena while the jansu was off playing general? “Yes, lord.”
As Bairith turned to the portal, it flickered with energy. “Chief Hamrin will see to your needs,” he said, dropping the name as casually as if everyone knew the man still lived in spite of Sherakai’s indiscretion. He stepped aside, one hand gesturing to the passage. “Win, Sherakai. Always win.”
What if he chose not to as he had once before? Either way, the adversaries in the arena provided a challenge. Villagers armed with farm tools and terror did not. He said nothing, but stepped into the portal.
Chapter 43
A tap came at the door to Sherakai’s rooms. He stepped away from the windows overlooking the Twixt’s perpetual storm as Hamrin Demirruk slipped inside.
“Sherakai.” Real warmth suffused the man’s voice and brightened his aspect. He crossed the floor to give his former student a hard, swift embrace. Then he caught his shoulders and stood back to look him up and down. The scarred face twisted in a smile.
“You are pleased to see me,” Sherakai observed uncertainly, going still at the unexpected welcome. The kindness seeped through him like heat from a fire.
“I am, lad, that I am. I didn’t think I would this side of the shroud. When the master said I was to mind ye again, I about fell over.”
“You? I do not believe it.” Chief Hamrin would never allow himself such weakness.
“It’s true. After that stunt ye pulled with the archer—” He scratched his head. “I thought ye were a dead man.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“No. Ye?”
Clearly not. “No, sir.”
He stepped back, hands on his hips. Happy. “How are ye?”
“I am—” His mouth opened and closed twice. “Well. I am.”
Another smile tugged at Hamrin’s rough features. “Ye look different. Well, but different.”
“You don’t. You haven’t aged a day.”
“Aye, well, I’ve been here in the Twixt since ye left. It’s been a long time.”
“How long?” Sherakai asked, daring to brush fingertips across the chief’s leathery cheek.
He grimaced but didn’t pull away. “Who can say? Years. Three or five, maybe.”
Folding his arms relieved the moment of its awkwardness. “The jansu brought me here after he—after he and Mage Tylond worked another magic enhancement. I didn’t fight in the arena.”
The genial expression disappeared, consumed by contempt. “What did they do to ye?”
Sherakai moved to a little table by the window. “You don’t want to know. I have wine. Te’hai, from Alshan.”
“Don’t do that.” Hamrin caught Sherakai’s shoulder, swinging him back. Instinctively, he knocked the man’s arm away so hard it drew a cry. “Great day, lad!” He retreated, gripping his wrist against his chest. “I’ve seen how their shader magic leaves ye.”
“What difference does it make? You are Bairith’s man by your own choosing.” By Hamrin’s expression, he’d hit a nerve, but Sherakai couldn’t see the bright weave of his pattern well enough to figure which.
“I’m his man, aye.” Hamrin pursed his lips then resolve set his jaw. “That doesn’t mean I stand behind any kind of dark magic. There’s lines, lad, and I won’t cross that one.”
“Haven’t you? Pledging your life to him and training his twisted freaks?”
Hamrin returned the glare Sherakai leveled at him without flinching. “Ye think yair twisted?” He stabbed the air. “That is a lie. Yair the steadiest, straightest man I’ve ever seen in this hall of lunatics.”
The remark nearly undid him. “I might have been before,” he accepted, voice heavy with remorse.
Hamrin chewed on that for a moment, then shook his arm out so he could uncork the bottle of wine sitting on the table. Setting down the stopper, he flexed his fist to work out the pain, then poured into two of three crystal goblets.
A few of the rumors about the heroes’ accommodations had proven true. He could claim several comfortable rooms, a fine feather bed, and food fit for a king. Sherakai followed Hamrin and sat, taking a goblet. “I shouldn’t drink this.”
“Why’s that? It’s yair favorite.” Hamrin turned his chair at an angle so he could stretch his legs out.
“You remembered…”
“We worked together pretty close for a while, lad. Answer my question.”
He inhaled the scent of the wine, then rolled a little sip over his tongue. “It makes my head funny.”
“One drink?”
Sherakai nodded.
The fire crackled quietly behind them. The sound of voices came and went in the corridor outside. “Will ye tell me what magic’s been done to ye?”
“He didn’t update you?” When Hamrin shook his head, Sherakai tilted his goblet to study the reflection of firelight in the glass. “He put the spirit of a rakeshi in me. I think I almost died. Except that’s not allowed.” His mouth bent down.
Hamrin sucked in a long breath, then blew it out again through pursed lips—quiet, as if Lord Chiro might hear him and find a reason to retaliate. His chair creaked when he shifted.
“You’re not going to say anything?” Sherakai asked.
“Aye, maybe. I don’t know how a thing like that is done, or how ye still look so human when all the others came out twisted or dead.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. How many times had he died and been dragged back into the land of the living? How hard had Bairith and Tylond fought to keep him alive after the rakeshi? “How many have there been?”
“Dozens. I’ve only trained a few. None of them—Well.” His dark eyes reflected the terrible things he’d seen. “It was bad business.”
“None of them what? Tell me, as I’ve told you.”
“Always asking for the hard answers, aren’t ye? They didn’t live, lad. Either the magic kept twisting their bodies until they died or it twisted their minds.”
“How reassuring,” he said without inflection.
“Ye asked. Why’d he do this to ye? Ye were his gold
en boy. He wouldn’t destroy ye a-purpose.”
“No.” Sherakai sipped his wine, then took another, larger mouthful. “He did it to fix me. To perfect me. The demon lives inside me, sir. It takes control, and I don’t always realize what it does. Or I see and I have nightmares about it.”
“Because ye didn’t have nightmares enough before,” the other man muttered under his breath. He scrubbed a hand over hair as dark as chicory root.
“My eyes go black. When they do, you should get away.” They weren’t supposed to be black, and that puzzled him. What other color ought they be, besides the obvious green they’d been his whole life?
Hamrin took a generous swallow of wine. Two. A more refined host would have taken insult. “The jansu said ye turned the Romuri back, and they would soon be his.”
“I was killing Alshani,” Sherakai scoffed.
“No, Romuri. Southeast. Ye surely pleased him with the way ye earned him an entire army.” He grimaced again. It was an expression far more common than the smile. “Can’t tell ye much more than that, I’m a trainer, not one of his captains. He didn’t give me details.”
Sherakai set his goblet down, turning it in absent circles as he struggled to recall those details for himself. The sergeant hadn’t shared their destinations with him, though he’d heard names now and then. They—he—had wreaked havoc on villages, supply stations, caravans, small troops, and the gods knew what else. Shadows and confusion cloaked so much of the journey. Why couldn’t he remember?
Because he didn’t want to. Because remembering meant seeing faces and counting bodies.
“He said that? That I was… useful?” He should not feel a flicker of pleasure; the price of gaining that sliver of praise was too high.
“He did.”
Better not to feel anything at all, and he’d done fine until the chief hugged him. He sucked his cheeks between his teeth and bit down.
“He’s never told ye that?”
“Why would he? He created me. My skills are only possible because of the effort he put into me. Into making me—”
“Making ye useful?” Hamrin interrupted, leaning forward. “The jansu didn’t make ye, lad. He’s not a god.”
“He made me. It is true.” Saying it out loud made his throat painfully tight.
“Ye don’t make a good sword out of sand any more than ye make fine sculptures out of honey. Ye have the makings he needed, lad, but they were yairs all along. Still are.”
A nagging thought scratched its way out of his past. “Do you know what a true Gift is?”
“I’ve always pictured it like a true sword. Or a true arrow. Straight and exactly balanced. It has all the parts it needs to perform perfectly.”
Sherakai ran his fingertip back and forth on the lip of his goblet. “Can a true Gift be broken?”
“Yair asking the wrong man, lad. There’s Twixt tales and hero stories by the wagonload, but ye know the truth in them is always buried deep.”
“They might be useful, otherwise.”
Hamrin laughed and took a too-hefty swallow of his drink.
“What am I?” Sherakai asked.
A blunt finger tapped the table top as Hamrin considered. His aspect slowly shifted and warmed. “Yair yet a boy,” he murmured. He thumped a fist over his heart. “Don’t get me wrong. Ye’ve done more—and had more done to ye—then most men face in a lifetime. Ye haven’t had the time or the space to mature the way most do, in bits instead of all at once. Running wild, fighting, kissing girls and getting in trouble.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“It might surprise ye the things a young man can discover when life takes its natural course.”
“I can’t imagine you young and in trouble.”
Hamrin laughed through his nose.
“Will you tell me?” Sherakai asked, both cautious and curious.
The chief peered into his wine, finished it, then poured another goblet full. “A’right,” he agreed, handing the bottle over. “But ye have to do the same.”
Sherakai started to refill his own glass, then put the bottle down again. “I don’t have any stories.”
“Ha. Ye didn’t come out of a bottle in Tylond Corlyr’s burrow. Ye had a mother and a father before ye came here. Brothers? Sisters?”
Sherakai nodded. “I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Then ye might as well be dead already, and them alongside.”
“Bairith killed my brothers.” His jaw worked. “And my father.” With my hands. He wanted to say those words, but they stuck in his throat like a thousand terrible razor blades.
Hamrin regarded him over the rim of his goblet. “The people we know and love live on in us.”
“How? What can I do for them now?”
“Tell their stories. Remember them.”
“There was one good thing. Not about them, though.”
“Aye?”
His nod was jerky. “Tylond Corlyr is dead.”
Hamrin snorted in disbelieving amusement. “Ye did that?”
“We did. The beast and I.”
He took a long drink, looking at Sherakai over the rim. “Good. The world’s a better place without that snake in it,” he said, setting his glass down within easy reach and leaning back in his chair, arms folded. “My mother was a rich woman.”
“No father?”
“Are ye interrupting already? Of course I had a father. Everyone has a father, don’t he? My mother,” he lowered a brow as if daring Sherakai to cut in again, “owned a brothel. Raked in the money, too, she did. And though she had help growing her stacks of coin, she never let any of us forget where it came from. She wanted good lives for us,” he went on. “Education. Good marriages. Connections. The whole self-righteous lot of it.”
Sherakai frowned. He’d had all that and hadn’t thought it so terrible.
“More rules than fish in the sea. So I ran away and joined the army.”
“I’ll bet they don’t have many rules.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Let me tell ye…”
The storytelling went on for hours. Hamrin drank enough wine to make him laugh at anything. He told stories about how he’d gone from soldier to sailor, who’d got him drunk and how, the first time he’d kissed a girl, and a dozen other tales in the same vein. He pretended not to notice when some of them made Sherakai’s ears burn.
His own adventures were juvenile in comparison. Hamrin wanted to hear them anyway, and he wasn’t afraid to ask questions to find out more details. He was good at it. Sherakai kneaded his temple, wishing the flashing light outside the windows would stop.
“Got a headache?” the chief asked.
“Yes.”
“Does that happen when ye drink spirits?”
“Yes.”
“Ye’ve only had one glass,” he observed mildly. “Yair eyes are getting dark, too. I thought it was the lamps or the weather, but the color is bleeding out into the whites.”
Alarm smashed the warm comfort of companionability. “You should go.”
“Soon.”
“Now.”
Nodding, Hamrin got to his feet. “It’s good to see ye again, Sherakai. Should I bolt the door?”
“The guards will take care of it.”
“Ah. I wondered what they were out there for. Ye ever see them use those weapons they carry? They shoot flames.”
“I’ve seen.” He, too, stood. “Thank you, Chief.”
“Aye. Ye remember that later when some Twixt brute is sitting on yair belly and ye want to blame me.”
“May you wake in the morning.”
“Ha! Ye remembered that!” On the threshold, Hamrin hesitated, worry creasing his brow. “Luck to ye, lad.” He shut the door gently.
The guards were not so considerate with the iron bar that clattered into the brackets. Sharp as any knife, the noise scored his sensitive hearing and peeled away his fragile serenity. The luminescence of the fire and the gentle warmth of his time with the chief disintegr
ated into dazzling shards of light and sound that drove him to his knees. He knocked the chair over. The crash as it fell threatened to shred his eardrums.
Back and forth his vision shifted. First too bright, now so dull he could hardly see, until he thought he might go mad. Righting the chair, he poured himself into it. The Twixt’s brassy light reflected on the half-finished bottle of te’hai. Could it put the rakeshi to sleep? Make him forget, even for a little while, that the wretched thing was stuffed inside him like a worm in a carcass.
Terrible metaphor, he decided, and reached for the wine. “How much of this will it take to blot out that infernal sky?” Even if he closed his eyes he could see it. Lightning gone crazy.
A civilized man would pour such a fine drink into a goblet to drink. He was not a man at all…
Chapter 44
It was yet another day, or “rotation” as the deckers called it after they’d been in the arena for a while. They never saw the sun, the sky never darkened. No one ever grew older, though they all aged. Mostly, it showed in their eyes. A rotation consisted of practice, weapon and armor repairs, fights, baths, and sleep, all interspersed with regular meals. One blended into the other in a circle broken only by Bairith Mindar's whim.
He would have left the colossal arena entirely and taken his chances in the Twixt if he could have found a way out. There were scores of portals such as the one between here and the Gates, but he didn't know how to make use of them even if he could get past the magical keys. The arena itself seemed to be one structure set inside another, with the public section never touching that of the fighters. Logic told him that was not possible or practical. That left magic. He couldn't manage his own, much less that of a foreign world.
“I don’t want to fight,” Sherakai said as Hamrin came up to join him at the entrance to the sands. The awful skies lit the space beyond, and the crowds in the stands filled it with the usual noise. The chief had missed practice earlier—not that he’d said he’d attend. Arena slaves had assisted Sherakai with his armor. They never spoke to him, never patted his hand reassuringly, never gave him toothy, challenging grins.
“Aye, I’m getting that idea,” the older man said dryly. “How many more fights until the governors catch on that yair losing on purpose?”
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