by Carol Berg
After a while I wondered if D’Natheil even knew whom he fought or why. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. Every step, every stroke, every attack, slash, spin, and parry seemed to take him farther away from himself, as if there were no real dispute with rights or wrongs or consequences, no war, no meaning outside his actions, only the unthinking, unending, glorious abstraction of combat. He was lost in passionless exaltation, his grace making Tomas look heavy-footed, his speed and strength making Tomas look old. Whatever the truth of his soul, the body that battled my brother that day was D’Natheil, the Heir of D’Arnath.
A ringing blow and the Champion’s sword clattered across the colorless paving stones. Tomas was on one knee, flushed, panting, and bleeding from a deep gash in his thigh.
D’Natheil held Rowan’s blade high over his shoulder, its edge on a line for Tomas’s neck. The Prince’s face was cold and deadly, and I felt that the very universe must be weeping silent tears.
No. No. No. I ached to cry out, to alter D’Natheil’s expression of uncaring inevitability. Tomas was my brother. Flesh of my flesh. I could not forget his eyes reflected in the glass back in his palace chambers—bewildered, guilt-wracked—craving forgiveness that he could not ask, knowing that I could not give.
Moments passed. The Prince did not strike. Slowly, he lowered his weapon and said, huskily, “Go. This is not your fight.”
“Do not dismiss me!” Tomas’s face was scarlet. “Finish me with honor or give me back my sword.”
The Prince shook his head. “I’ll not fight you. Those who chose you chose well, but I will not slay the Duke of Comigor, son of the Lord Gervaise.” He stuck his sword tip under Tomas’s blade and with a twist of his wrist flipped the gleaming weapon into the air, so that it came down hilt-first into its owner’s hand.
Tomas’s anger was supplanted by surprise and curiosity. “How do you know me?” D’Natheil glanced over my brother’s shoulder and tipped his head. Tomas’s eyes followed his. “Seri!”
The world paused in its turning.
“Yes, your traitorous sister is here, Lord Tomas,” said Giano, breaking his long silence and drawing Tomas’s gaze away from me. “She has betrayed you once again, Your Grace, betrayed your king, violated the sacred honor of your house by consorting with this sorcerer prince. She exemplifies the corruption he brings, mocking you, and prostituting your son’s heritage. I’m prepared to turn her over to you as soon as you discharge your duty to your king.”
Tomas stood up slowly and waved his sword point from Giano to me. “Let her go.”
“The sorcerer disdains you,” said Giano. “Can you not see the scorn in which he holds your king, your people? He thinks to make you impotent by flaunting his rape of your sister’s mind, this ultimate violation begun by that other of his kind. You remember . . . the one you so prudently removed from this world, the one who sought to pollute your very bloodlines with his foul seed.”
“You were right, Seri,” said my brother, staring at Giano. “Until this moment, I’d forgotten your warning about the one with the empty eyes.” He sheathed his sword and folded his arms across his breast. “I’ll fight no more until I understand what’s happening here.” Without taking his eyes from the Zhid, he said, “This is his friend. Darzid’s friend.”
But in the moment he uttered Darzid’s name, Tomas was lost. A leaden shutter dropped across his face, and like a wooden doll jerked onto the stage by its puppetmaster, he snarled and whirled to face D’Natheil. And before I could connect his altered behavior with Giano’s upraised fist, my brother drew his sword, roared a curse, and attacked. The startled Prince could do nothing but counter, and Tomas, in his madness, could not adjust to his opponent’s lightning response. D’Natheil’s sword was driven deep by the force of Tomas’s charge.
Tomas sagged, and when the Prince withdrew his blade, my brother slumped to the floor. Then the Zhid warrior released me and, together with the Zhid woman, drew his weapon and fell upon the Prince before D’Natheil could even see what he’d done.
I ran to Tomas and dragged him away from the combat. Blood poured from the gaping wound in his side. With his knife, I hacked a strip from my skirt and bound the folded rag in place around him with my cloth belt. Not fair. Not fair. Did the saving of the world require this blood, too? I clutched my brother in my arms and wished that I could pray.
A sword skittered across the paving, coming to rest beside the curtain of fire. The burly Zhid was down, leaving a smeared trail of blood as he crawled toward his dropped weapon. The woman was fading fast under D’Natheil’s relentless assault. I assumed Giano would be the next to attack, but the smiling Zhid commander leaned his shoulder against the wall and watched.
The fallen Zhid reached for his sword, but the battle raged close, and D’Natheil kicked the weapon past the Gate fire. The Zhid warrior lurched after it, reaching through the curtain of dark flame, then screamed murder-ously as he pulled back, half his body blackened and smoldering.
When would Giano move? The Prince’s victory seemed close. Tremors shook the foundation of the chamber, and the cold gnawed at my bones. The Gate fire burned blue-black. I should be rejoicing in D’Natheil’s skill, yet I was foundering in a sea of dread. The Prince was furious and determined, his face void of everything but battle. The Zhid woman was staggering, bleeding from uncountable wounds. Then she was down, D’Natheil kneeling beside her with a knife in his hand, his own silver dagger with the emblem of D’Arnath engraved upon it.
What was the horror that filled me as I watched him, so grim and implacable, raising his dagger to finish his enemy? Giano smiled and did nothing. The Gate fire was the same bruised color as the storm that had driven us to Pell’s Mound.
This was wrong. All wrong.
Dassine’s message of love and trust resounded in my memory. He believed Karon should be here, not D’Natheil. Why? There had to be a reason. There is that in D’Natheil that will tell him what must be done. But Dassine had meant in the D’Natheil he had sent, not in the prince who had grown up in Avonar, the one who knew only of fighting and death. Why Karon?
As the Prince’s dagger fell through the pregnant air, I lunged for his arm, deflecting his blow. D’Natheil shoved me away in cold fury. “Why? Why must I stop? What do you mean, this is not the way?”
Though I had uttered no sound, clearly he had heard the plea I was screaming in my thoughts. As a snarling Giano grabbed my shoulder and wrenched me backward, I tried desperately to focus my words. Look at the Gate fire, how dark. Dassine took your memories because you had been trained in the wrong way. All these years, the Dar’Nethi have fought and lost. You must find a different way to accomplish your task.
Giano shoved me against the wall. “Interfering whore. Do you think I can’t hear your maudlin pleas? I should have disposed of you long ago.” His hatred bored into my head like a hot poker, but I would not allow him in. I had not forgotten how to create a barrier in my mind.
The Prince’s silver dagger was again raised to finish the Zhid. I closed my eyes and fought to keep my head clear of everything but what was most important. When I looked again the dagger had not fallen, and D’Natheil’s gaze shifted frantically from one to the other of his victims.
“Giano has planned all this,” I told him, surprised to find the torrent of words bursting free of Giano’s silencing. “It’s why we were able to free you so easily last night. He let us do it. Just as he let us go at Ferrante’s, and in Yurevan, and again in Montevial. They never wanted to capture you. I was so stupid to think we had outsmarted them again and again. It was always too easy. Did you hear him? When you said you wouldn’t lie down and die for him, he said he never intended that you should. He brought Tomas, knowing well he could never defeat you. Giano wants you to kill them all.”
“Then tell me what I must do!” said the Prince, throwing his knife to the floor, his mouth tight with anger.
I had to follow Dassine’s lead. Instruction could not give the Prince the power
he needed. “You must find the answer inside yourself. Dassine believed you could. I believe it. I know you, D’Natheil. You are worthy . . . so very worthy . . . of our trust.”
“So the Prince of Fools has become a slave to a woman,” said Giano, stepping forward. Perhaps I only imagined the note of anxiety in his sneering. “Ironic, is it not, that by sending you to this woman, Dassine has robbed you of your only virtue? The Dulcé was right. She is a curse.”
But the Prince was not listening to Giano. He took up his knife again, brushing his fingers along the blade and staring at the burned Zhid who lay moaning in wordless agony. D’Natheil’s stony visage softened to puzzled curiosity as he touched the dying warrior’s mutilated arm.
Giano stiffened and hissed, and without warning he wrapped his arms about me and yanked me to his breast. The dagger that had taken Baglos’s life and that of the highwaymen in During Forest was poised at my heart, and one by one my senses burst into flame, until I believed that the Gate fire must be burning beneath my very skin. But the Prince did not look up, and I refused to cry out. He needed time to see his way.
My captor dragged me toward the wall of fire, the blue-black curtain soaring in vicious exhilaration into the murky heights, and the Zhid began to laugh with such triumphant wickedness that D’Natheil was drawn to look. When the Prince saw what was happening, all softness fled from his face. He leaped up, grabbing his sword, and my heart shriveled. Giano’s fire had grown so fierce that I could not bear it, and I began to sob.
“Let go of the woman,” said the Prince, cold and angry. “I am the one you want.”
“So you are, but I will have you on my terms. We must rid ourselves of this meddlesome female before she saps all your resolve.” And with wicked laughter that rang through the stone chamber, Giano shoved me through the wall of black fire.
CHAPTER 36
I was not dead. Either the Zhid was wrong that the passage of the barrier would destroy me or he didn’t truly want me dead. But the place where I existed had no relationship to any world I knew. Bolts of lightning slashed through purple-gray clouds above a desolation of skeletal trees and naked crags. Though lurid and grotesque, such a view would have been almost comprehensible if it had been the entirety of the landscape. But from the corners of my eyes I glimpsed entirely different scenes: on one side a field of garishly colored flowers that budded and bloomed and withered in moments under a livid sun, and, on the other, a slow-moving river of filth that was a crush of emaciated men and women, clawing and trampling each other so as to drink from a lake of blood. When I turned my head to either hand, the scene would vanish, and only the alien landscape remain. A bitter wind lacerated my skin, leaving bloody tracks, and the tumultuous roar of the Gate fire—now deafening in its volume—was riven with a hideous, howling chorus of despair. Hellish pandemonium.
My flesh did not burn like that of the Zhid who had touched the fire. But my being vibrated like a violin string out of tune, and great cracks exploded through my reason so that I could not hold the fragments of myself together. Visions . . . or memories . . . yet not memories . . . nothing of beauty or sweetness . . . displayed themselves against the mad backdrop: my drunken father vomiting over Tomas’s dying body, Martin laughing as he stripped the skin from a screaming Tennice’s back, and my mother, my lovely, delicate mother, mating in a sweating frenzy with Evard. One after the other, such twisted visions supplanted each memory I treasured, severing every link to love, joy, pride, or accomplishment until only horror was real.
Perhaps this is death, after all. If so, then let it be done with. The dark void proclaimed by Leiran priests, the absolute ending I had always dreaded, would be far better.
Though my mind was chaos, my feet stood on solid ground. I was no longer held captive by the hand that had plunged me into the tumult, but he was close, a solid, malevolent companion to the monstrous apparitions assailing me from every side. He laughed as a pair of green, slavering jaws gaped before me in the darkness, and when I turned away in panic, a river of molten lava blocked my path. Another turn and a hideous beast with two heads and razor-sharp claws the size of my arm loomed over me out of the murk.
Cry out to him all you wish, woman. His nature betrays him. You’ve led him to his doom.
The words meant nothing to me.
“Seri!” Ever so faintly I heard the call through the thunder, but I could pay it no heed. Something was approaching from behind me, something more awful than anything I’d yet seen. It had no name, but I had to run before it showed itself, and the only path open led away from the beckoning voice.
Move, fool! I cried. Ignore the hissing cobra the size of a tree that raises its hood, wrapping you in a gaze so malevolent it could steal your soul away. A rotting cadaver extended its bony fingers, leaving great smudges of unnamable disgust on your arms. Concentrate on the path beneath your feet.
“Seri!” The insistent call came again. But it was only another voice in the cacophony of lamentation, the growls and wails and screams—screams that might be my own for all I knew.
I ran. But chaos has no direction, and my flight brought me only to the place I had been before. The two that battled in that place, swords glinting with the lightnings from the raging storm, were not apparitions. Both were in black, the one with thin lips and pale eyes that reflected nothing, and the other with broad shoulders and blue eyes that flashed with fire and steel. Real blood flowed from their wounds, and I should care. I should speak a name, but I could not bring it to my lips.
Frantic, I backed away from the combatants and fled once more. I ran along a perilous track so narrow I could not put my feet side by side. If I stopped, I would topple into the bottomless nightmare that gaped on either side of me. My throat burned. My blood pounded. The nameless thing was close behind.
“Seri!” The summoning rang out once more, and like a thread pulled from the weft, I was drawn inexorably to the place of battle. The two combatants were bathed in blood and sweat, so that one might think it was the battle for the doom of the world. But I cackled in my madness, for I knew the doom of the world was just behind me, and whatever the result of this duel, it could make no difference.
I had to get away. My path led through mud that sucked at my feet and rain that scalded my face. I could not run in the mud, only slog through it, pushing aside the half-rotted corpses that rose to the surface like flotsam in a morbid sea. My heart pounded with the effort, but soon the mud was up to my knees. The path led into a cave. Beasts of heaven, not a cave! Even the ghastly lightnings were swallowed by that pit. No glimmer, no spark, no dim ray, no pale reflection relieved the nightmare darkness. The hot mud was to my waist, but I could see nothing, and I dared not reach out for the walls lest I find them closing in on me. And the demons, too, were waiting . . .
“Seri! Stay close!” Weaker, yet enough to pull me back again. Next time. Next time I would escape his tether, leave him to his bloody combat, to his ending.
The two who battled were on the ground now, weapons thrown aside. Grunting, twisting until the blue-eyed one lay atop the other. The pale one’s arm outstretched was all that stayed the deadly stroke of the shining dagger.
Now, woman, witness the changing of the world. And as I watched, the pale one, the one with the empty eyes, broke into wild laughter and with a crow of triumph snatched his hand away. All the force of the battle was focused in the silver dagger that plunged into his own heart. So much blood! A fountain of it, washed into a red river by the scalding rain. The pale one’s bestial exultation did not fade with his surrender. His echoing laughter was the essence of horror, and the evil thing was upon me.
“No!” I sobbed, and I crouched down in the river of blood and covered my head so I could not see the end of the world. The wind howled and the thunder roared; the hot rain fell on my back. The ground beneath me writhed and groaned. When I felt hands on my arms, I flinched and cried out.
But the hands that gathered me in were not the hands of a monster, nor of madness,
but were gentle and strong. The voice that spoke in my mind was not foul, but comforting and dear. Go back through the Gate. I cannot protect you any longer and do what I must do. I understand now, but there’s little time, and I’ll need everything I can muster. Do you understand?
I looked up at the blue eyes, but I could not comprehend his meaning and could not answer.
The strong hands guided me to a veil of pulsing blackness. Step through and wait for me, beloved. Wait for me.
He gave me a gentle push, and I stumbled into a circular chamber of stone filled with clouds of ice and the stench of blood and death. Three lives were leaking away on the stone floor, two men and a woman. I could not say who they were.
My cold, wet knuckles pressed to my mouth, I sank to the floor among the fallen, no less wounded than they, though I did not bleed. Beyond the black veil of fire, my rescuer knelt by the empty-eyed one he had slain and yanked the dagger from the dead man’s chest. But he did not sheath the bloody weapon as I expected, or wipe it clean, or plunge it in again to make sure of his evil opponent as I wanted him to do. Instead he turned the knife on himself.
“Don’t! Please don’t!” I needed someone left living to tell me my name.
He did not answer, but neither did he slay himself. Rather he drew the dagger across his muscled left arm with a sure and steady hand. Then he did the same to the fallen warrior, took a worn belt of woven string from his waist, and bound his arm to that of the dead man.
Numb, understanding nothing of what was happening, I whispered an echo of the words that rang clearly through the wall of fire. “Life, hold! Stay your hand. Halt your foot ere it lays another step along the Way. Grace your son once more with your voice that whispers in the deeps, with your spirit that sings in the wind, with the fire that blazes in your wondrous gifts of joy and sorrow. Fill my soul with light, and let the darkness make no stand in this place.” The words became my anchor. Wait for me, he had said.