The approaching soldier speaks from within a few feet of where I stand.
“Heil Hitler,” he says, raising his hand.
I look back, flinching when I see how close he stands to me.
Revik lowers his hand from the returning salute, wrapped in a winter coat, wearing a cap of the German Wehrmacht. Breath comes out of his narrow lips in thick clouds. He has a beard, and his eyes reflect back the sky in darker tones. With one boot, he prods at a body frozen in the snow below where he stands.
“They have found more, then?” he says in German.
“What? Found what, sir?”
“Glow eyes.” Revik’s own eyes shift up. “Jews. Communists. Are they bringing them back alive, or just shooting them?” He half-smiles, his voice bitter. “Because we could use the bullets.”
I stare at him, more shocked by his eyes than his words.
I have never seen that expression before––on anyone.
“Sir.” The soldier takes a breath. “Sir, we cannot remain here. Russian infantry traveling south from Rostov, moving fast. The panzers are stuck in the mud a few miles up—”
“Pull them back,” Revik says. “Those in the town, too. I imagine their fun is spent. Or their tolerance for the smell of burning flesh, at least.” The bitterness edges towards what lies under it now, something more raw, almost painfully real. Grief comes off him in a dense cloud, along with a heavier despair that goes beyond all of those things.
“Do as I say, Lieutenant,” he says, when the other hesitates. When the soldier turns to go, however, Revik’s voice stops him.
“Any news on von Rundstedt?”
I cannot tear my eyes from Revik’s face, lost in the unhappiness I see there.
“Sir.” The man hesitates again, turning. “The advance divisions were forced to turn back. Von Rundstedt has been, well… replaced, sir. For health reasons is the word of the office.”
At Revik’s harder look, the soldier’s face reddens. “We are to be led by General von Reichenau in the next attempt. You are in charge of the Eleventh until von Reichenau can evaluate our status.”
Revik nods. Stomping snow off his boots, he turns, gazing out over the body-strewn field. The feeling in his eyes is gone by the time he completes the motion. He clasps black-gloved hands at his back.
“And my recommendation to Berlin?” he says. “We could be helping them in the West.”
“Denied, sir. Blauvelt felt—”
“Blauvelt?” Revik’s eyes turn to ash. “Is our Fuhrer no longer deciding strategy on the Eastern Front? It is fallen to his swine, instead?”
The other hesitates. Stepping closer, he lowers his voice.
“Sir, when I spoke to his man, he had news, sir. A message. He claimed to know you, and recommended me to assist him in this…” The man’s voice trails as Revik’s eyes narrow.
“Well?”
The man takes a breath. “It’s about your wife, sir.”
Revik’s face grows whiter than the snow flurrying around them in dry bursts. He is reading the man’s mind now. He no longer hears the words coming from his lips.
The world fades around the wind-chapped face of the unnamed soldier speaking to him earnestly. Details remain with me briefly, the smell of rotting corpses and unwashed clothes, burnt flesh imprinted permanently behind his eyes, knowing that friends and even relatives burned in those ovens, that the humans are no longer simply doing it to one another.
Then, all of it is gone.
…I JERK VIOLENTLY. I am somewhere else. Indoors now, warmed by a fire blazing in a grate, its light casting flickering shadows over a dated room that doesn’t feel dated here.
A mirror hangs over the fireplace. Fresh flowers bloom over a flower-patterned vase with wing-like handles. I gaze into reflective glass, see a room washed in dusty pinks and rosewood trim. Lamplight warms a stained-glass shade from a table beside a heavy wardrobe.
For a moment, the sounds of wet wood crackling distract me.
Then I hear breathing––the heavy, half-expressed breaths of a rhythm I recognize.
I look towards the bed. Tufts of gray hair stand unevenly across a man’s bare shoulders and in patches along the sides of his thick back. He lets out a low grunt.
The woman under him, I recognize. Her thick, curled dark hair lays in an artful fan on the bed. She smiles at him, but the smile is painted on, practiced. A shiver of revulsion reaches me as she stares up at his face; it’s gone before I realize it’s not mine.
The woman is tired. I feel her unhappiness like a shroud.
The door slams open.
The sound is loud, but I can only watch, unsurprised to see him, although he looks different to me now, older than he’s ever looked to me. His eyes shine, appearing nearly black as he stands in shadow by the door. My gaze drifts to his white, long-fingered hands.
I see them clutching the wooden handle of an ax.
The woman has seen him, too. Her voice is filled with terror, but not for herself. Her words come out in a near wail.
“Rolf! Rolf, no! Darling, no!”
He is walking to them in a straight line, his long legs moving with a quiet grace I recognize.
“Rolf! They know what you are!”
He doesn’t look at his wife, but at the stretch of white skin and tufted gray hair. Blauvelt has turned his head, eyes wide in shock, but he hasn’t pulled out of Revik’s wife.
Revik swings the ax before he completes his last stride, embedding it between the man’s shoulder blades. It sinks down to the thickest part of the blade.
Blauvelt screams.
Revik slams the wooden stock forward, ripping it out with a thick, wet sound and Blauvelt screams and screams and screams…
Revik’s wife screams with him.
Unflinching, his face a mask of emptiness, Revik raises the blade and swings again.
…I AM LOST. I am lost.
I am with him again––inside him, perhaps.
A farmhouse lays buried in snow. I lay with him and Elise, two forms huddled in ratty blankets, a man and a woman. The woman is pregnant, at least seven months, and she is asleep, though the man is not.
Revik lays on his back in the dark, watching the snow fall through the square window at one end of the hay loft. His face looks almost dead to me now.
His eyes sharpen with a sudden flash of light, and he raises his head.
His skin is whiter, his weight less. His beard is shorter, and unevenly cut.
He is listening. There is a resignation in his eyes as he looks down at his wife. She has lost weight also, and her dark hair is matted with dirt, limp on the straw by her hollow cheeks. Her eyes are bruised with fatigue. When the doors burst open below, he hesitates, then shakes her gently awake. Hearing the sounds in the barn, she stiffens, clasping his arm.
“We are caught,” he says quietly. “They know we are here.”
Her eyes widen like a frightened animal. “No—”
“You need a doctor, Ellie.”
She starts to argue, but he puts a finger to her lips. He is just sitting there when the SS Commander lifts his head above the lip of the hayloft, holding a Lugar. Before the man can speak, Revik sits up, raises his hands so they are visible.
“Rolf Schenck?”
Revik nods. “That is me.”
“You are under arrest.”
His wife, still half-lying beside him, bursts into tears.
…DARKNESS FILLS ME, cold. I hear her last words to him. She thinks he let himself be caught. She thinks it is some thinly disguised revenge, an excuse couched in fake nobility.
There is some truth in what she says, he knows.
Yet he did not do it for the reasons she thinks.
He has no place to take her, not anymore.
You want to die so much? I hope they torture you! I hope they beat you half to death…
She bursts into tears, clutching at him.
I hate you! I hate you! You do not love me!
…then sh
e is gone, too.
There is nothing to push against, nothing with which to push. A faint whisper of voices speaks softly, a tinge of warmth he cannot quite feel. He knows that is his fault, too. He will not let the voices near enough to feel them. He does not want their false assurances. He does not want them to tell him things he cannot yet bear to hear.
The soldiers come to tell him his wife is dead, that Blauvelt’s child killed her.
When he attacks them, they laugh. He attacks again and again, until he hurts some of them, until they beat him down to the stone. He continues to fight, until his body will no longer function. The light is gone.
It is gone.
…I WAKE ALONE in the dark.
I wonder if it is sleep I came from, or simply another place. A place of numbness, of dark, of unending silence. I don’t feel alive. I don’t remember what alive feels like. The only hints I continue to exist live in emotions too painful, too wrenching to ignore.
Anger lives here, as well, a wanting of––something.
That something is death, but death alone feels empty, unsatisfactory. His muscles hurt from disuse, and of all things belonging to him that he would like to use now, it is them.
He amuses himself with their minds instead, if they are foolish enough to be alone with him. He flexes the only muscle he can. He ignores the voices that grow fainter and fainter as he learns new trails in the light.
They know what he is.
His marriage is void. He was never married.
He gets the followers, too. They leave him notes, send him scriptures. Some believe him an angel and some think him a devil. He doesn’t discriminate; he hates them all.
His wife gets her wish, too. They beat him when they’re bored, but it’s never enough––for them, or for him.
He has forgotten the reason that brought him here, the thing that once seemed so important.
It is a story to him now. It strikes him as juvenile, childish.
In any case, his own people will not come for him. Not anymore. Perhaps not even before he became a murderer.
This will all end soon.
He knows enough to allow it to happen. He sits, leaning on a stone wall. His hands crumple together in his lap, his wrists encased in iron chains. His face is covered in bruises. His skin twitches when a fly alights on a cut, but he does not brush it away.
It happens again. And again.
A clanking emerges from outside.
The door opens and Revik squints as two men enter. Surprise touches his light; his internal clock tells him it is too soon. But these are not priest and guard. The first man is of medium build and wears expensive clothes. Where his face should sit, I see only a blur, a movie screen on which several movies are being projected at once.
The second man I know from a diner in San Francisco.
Like Revik, Terian does not appear to have aged. He wears the black uniform of the Gestapo. On him, it looks like a party costume.
“Rolf Schenck?” the man who is not Terian says.
Revik looks the two men over. He does not know either of them.
“I've answered all of your… questions,” he says. “Or would you like to hit me some more?” He raises his bound hands. “Maybe you could take these off? I could use the exercise.”
Terian laughs, nudging the man with no face.
“I'll hit him, sir,” he says. “He seems to want it so badly.”
“No.” The new man’s focus stays on Revik. “No. I think we could find better ways to spend our time together. Perhaps, as Terian here believes, we could be frank with one another, yes?”
Revik gives Terian a dismissive look, looking at the man with no face.
“Does he make you feel safe, worm?” he says only.
The faceless man smiles through his shifting countenance.
“You are operating under a misconception, Rolf. I do not speak for the Reich, nor for any of the human governments. I would like to offer you a job. One you’ll find interesting, I think, even apart from your current lack of options.”
Revik uses his mind to scan the human in the expensive clothes. He cannot read this faceless man. He assumes the seer with him shields them both.
He lets his hands fall to his lap, shrugs.
“I'll be otherwise engaged. Or hadn't they told you they plan to cut off my head?”
Terian laughs, and Revik’s eyes flicker back to his.
“I told you, sir.” Terian smiles, looking at Revik like he’s his favorite new toy. “He will be well worth our time. Once we’ve honed the snarl a bit.”
The faceless man acts like he doesn’t hear. “I think we can help you with your little problem, Rolf,” he says. “Or should I just call you Revik? Living amongst us hasn't made you forget your true name entirely, I hope?”
Revik’s eyes swivel to Terian, this time in utter disbelief.
“Yes,” the faceless man says. “I know who you are. Not only Rolf Schenck, German patriot, but Dehgoies Revik, seer of clan Arenthis.”
Revik continues to look only at Terian. He speaks in that other language next, the one filled with rhythmic clicks and rolling purrs.
Only this time, I understand him.
“What game is this?” Revik says to the other seer. “You gave our clan keys to a human? The elders will hang you for this.”
It is the faceless human who answers him, though, speaking in the same language.
“Rules were broken, it is true,” he says, gesturing smoothly, seer-like. Revik follows the motion with his eyes, his expression stunned. “But you can be selective with rules as well, Rolf. Such as the one against choosing a mate from among the females of my kind.”
He clucks his tongue ruefully.
“For these things tend to happen with humans, do they not? Sadly, my kind does not have the same respect for loyalty to their mates. Nor do most in my race understand the true repercussions of commitment.”
His hands open as if in prayer.
I see a ring on his finger, what looks like an Iron Cross.
“She was lovely, cousin,” he adds. “I am sorry you lost her to such a vile representative of my species. Truly.”
Revik’s eyes change. For the first time, they belong to the Revik I know. The anger and youth is leached out of them.
“What is it you want?” he says.
I glance at Terian, who is smiling. His gaze is predatory too, like he sees that thing in Revik, and wants it for himself.
“My name is Galaith,” the faceless man says. “Perhaps you have heard it?”
There is a silence. Then Revik snorts a laugh.
“You are the scourge of the seer world?” he says. “The one who downed Syrimne, single-handed? You are lying.”
Terian takes a step closer, his humor less visible now.
Galaith holds up a hand to each of them, like a teacher breaking up a fight at school.
“Who I was is perhaps less important than who I have become,” he says diplomatically. He asks Revik, “Why have you not simply walked out of this cell, cousin? If you wanted out, they could not hold you.”
Revik lets his shoulders unclench. Still eyeing Terian, he shrugs, folding his arms tighter.
“Perhaps I deserve to die,” he says.
Galaith nods. “Are you so tired of this life, then? You are young to feel this way. For your kind, I mean.”
Revik stares at Terian. “Perhaps I am. Tired, that is.”
The faceless man and Terian exchange a subtle smile, then Galaith’s voice warms.
“I understand, cousin. More than you know. But, you see, there are many like you and I, Rolf. Tired of senseless death and war. Tired of the world being led by liars and old men, dreamers and fanatics. Those who feel the Codes, laws, bibles and prejudices of both species no longer represent the current realities of either. We would like to see these Codes…” He smiles. “…Modernized, as it were.”
Revik closes his eyes, leaning his head on stone. “Approach my brother, Whelen.
”
“You have not yet heard my proposal—”
“––And yet I am not a fool,” Revik cuts in, opening his eyes. “Whatever game you and your pet Sark are playing, it is my family name you want. You picked the wrong son. Nothing I said would ever be heard in the Pamir, least of all by my own family. And I have had my fill of humans and your… ‘modernization.’”
The faceless man holds up a hand, another gesture of supplication.
“I know your life has been hard, Revik. I know of the death of your parents. I know too that you were adopted by a family that did not want you.”
When Revik’s jaw hardens, Galaith’s tone grows cautious.
“I also know of your current problems, as I have said. But women die in childbirth, cousin. Even among your own kind. It is pointless to throw away such a promising, young life for what is a relatively natural event. She was not seer. This suicide of yours cannot be inevitable.”
He pauses, watching Revik’s face.
“Was the child Blauvelt's? Or another’s?”
Revik doesn’t answer at first. He gives a short laugh.
“You really want me to kill you. Perhaps I should oblige this wish of yours.”
Galaith holds up his hand again. “You are wrong about me. My regret for your misfortune is sincere, cousin.” He pauses, still watching Revik’s face. “And I have already spoken with your blood cousin, Whelen,” he adds. “I told him where you are. I told him of your predicament. Your family understands more than you believe, despite your decision to distance yourself, to live among my people and participate in this heinous war on her behalf.”
“It was not for her,” Revik said.
“It was for her, brother. You felt obligated—”
“I meant, it was not her fault.” Revik is once more staring into the shadow-darkened corners of the cell. “Please go.”
“Revik, your cousin, Whelen, doesn’t interest me.” Galaith’s words contain a gentle pull. “We have no need of family names. That clan nonsense is of the past. I want your talent, Revik. I believe you will prove to be our most valuable asset yet.”
Terian leans closer. He holds up two fingers in a backwards V, wiggling them at Revik.
Rook (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #1): Bridge & Sword World Page 14