“Look at him,” Sareea said with a piteous laugh. “Thinks he’s a white knight, some defender of the helpless.”
“Hey, I’m hardly helpless,” Erith said, annoyed.
“Then protect yourself against this,” Amenon said, extending a hand toward her as his fingers glowed red.
“NO!” Terian called as the spell magic leapt forward. He swept down with the axe blade and it clanged off his father’s armor, directed into the nearest chink in his armor, a gap at the forearm. The axe sunk in, blood squirted out, and his father dropped to one knee.
“AIEEEE!” Erith’s scream filled the cavern and Terian whirled to see her with her arm hanging free, blood shooting out in a perfect re-creation of the wound he’d just inflicted on his father. Her skin ran with boils, with stagnant, curdled blood opening in sores, and when she opened her mouth the air stunk of rot, of powerful horror, and her eyes went white and sightless.
“Erith!” Terian called, but she wobbled then fell to the ground, unmoving as black blood oozed into the dirt in a slow wash, and his last ally in Saekaj and Sovar died where she lay.
83.
J’anda
One Hundred Years Earlier
He’d received the summons and come as quickly as he could, the Sovereign’s note warning him to present himself immediately. It had caught him at the Gathering, working with students, on a rare day when he did so now. He’d received his orders to return to the front lines in a week, in preparation for a battle that would take the fight to the elves over the river Perda, and he found little anticipation in that idea. To be away from court is to be away from the Sovereign’s favor, and more than that, to be away from …
… Trimane.
He was allowed into the palace in the customary manner, with none of the pomp or circumstance of court days, but that was expected. It was how it always was when he came for a private audience. It had happened frequently of late, the Sovereign summoning him to talk, to converse, to share counsel, and it was such a strange sensation, standing in the presence of a god and offering opinion.
He was not kept waiting long in the anteroom before the throne room; just long enough to suspect that whoever was currently having counsel with the Sovereign was someone of great import, like Dagonath Shrawn, perhaps, or that dark knight that everyone was talking about. What was his name? Amenon Lepos, that was it. Soon to be a general, to hear the court tell it.
When he came in, J’anda was not announced. That was not unusual, even on court days, though. What was unusual was finding the Sovereign enshrouded in the veil of darkness, looming on the throne like a black cloud of coal smoke hanging on the ceiling of Sovar.
“J’anda Aimant,” the Sovereign said, so formally that it caused J’anda to slow his pace.
“You summoned me and I have come,” J’anda said, taken slightly aback. “What service can I provide for you this day, my Sovereign?”
“What service indeed,” the Sovereign said, still shrouded in the darkness, his voice high and bereft of the warmth J’anda had come to expect from it of late.
J’anda approached the throne and found himself increasingly wary as he did so. Is he in a mood, or have I done something to offend him …? “My Sovereign—” he began, but did not manage to get it out.
“You have been hiding something from me, J’anda,” the Sovereign said from out of the darkness. “Hiding something from everyone, it would seem.”
J’anda froze as though an ice spell had hit him, penetrating his stomach, seeping into his bowels, chilling him inside and out. His head felt suddenly weightless, as though it had been ripped free of his body. “My Sovereign—”
“Do not offer your excuses,” the Sovereign said, and the cloud grew as Yartraak got to his feet. He towered overhead. “You have been caught engaging in deviant behavior with Trimane Hareminn. I have seen it with my own eyes.”
Now the ground felt as though it had fallen out from under J’anda, as though he were suddenly very high up and spiraling to the earth below. “I … I don’t …” Words did not come, thoughts did not come, and it was suddenly both warm and hot, as a trickle of sweat crawled down the back of his neck, the oily scent that hung in the room overwhelming him, crawling into his nose and lingering there, making his already queasy stomach feel sick.
“You cannot even deny it,” the Sovereign said, in a cross between crowing and fury, “and you do not try.”
J’anda let the accusation hang hard in the air. His skin crawled as though a flight of insects had come over him, shame running over his flesh, horror at being exposed as strong as if someone had kicked down his door while he had been in the act. “I don’t … know what to say.”
“You have broken our laws,” the Sovereign said, cold contempt causing J’anda to recoil at every word as though it were screamed in his ear rather than delivered with quiet fury. “You have shamed us and yourself.”
Do I dare deny it? He did not look up, afraid to stare into the darkness for fear that the red eyes would catch his. He is certain. He does know. But … how? “I am … sorry,” he said, and the mere words made him feel even sicker, as though he’d just been forced to agree with a particularly appalling sentiment, such as that innocent children should be a perfectly viable food source for Sovar.
The darkness shifted, and J’anda could see the hints of red as the Sovereign stared down at him. “You are contrite, I can see that. Ashamed, as you should be for your … disgusting behavior.”
J’anda kept himself from shaking at the knees, though only barely. He felt as nauseous as any illness had ever made him, and his mind raced with thoughts of Trimane. Did the Sovereign find out from him? Is he … all right?
Please let him be all right. Let him have merely betrayed me … been tortured into betraying me, even … son of an important house, surely they’ll merely send us both to the Depths together for a spell. Or perhaps just me …
“I feel nothing but shame,” J’anda said, telling the lie only through great effort. “I am sorry to have been such a disappointment to you.”
“And indeed you have been a disappointment,” the Sovereign said. “I favored you, promoted you, sought your counsel, and here I find that behind my back you have been engaged with this sort of depravity.” The Sovereign made a sound of disgust. “I will have several of my harem sent to your home immediately, and you will absolve yourself of these gross and disturbing allegations by curing yourself of your deviancy with them, do you understand?”
J’anda felt his eyes flutter involuntarily. “You … are merciful, my Sovereign.” His head bobbed inadvertently. He felt as though it would float away, or perhaps split open, or simply disgorge the contents of his stomach, he was not sure which.
“I truly am,” the Sovereign said, and the shroud of darkness departed, leaving Yartraak standing before him, his disproportionately skinny body tall and gangly next to the small figure of a man who stood only to his hip, smiling with a grin so wide that J’anda could scarcely recognize the man for who he was.
Vracken Coeltes? But … why—
J’anda’s eyes fluttered again as Coeltes stepped forward with a box. It was cradled delicately in his hands as though it were important, something so delicate he could not possibly bear to see it come to harm. Coeltes offered it to him, still grinning wider, with more satisfaction than J’anda had ever seen from him.
“I have taken steps to insure that you do not stray from the path I have set before you again, J’anda,” the Sovereign said as Coeltes offered the box to him again. “It troubles me that a Hero of Saekaj could be so easily swayed into deviancy. Take my good faith in you as a sign, and go forth with my blessings, remembering always that I have been firm but fair in my treatment of you.”
J’anda’s eyes locked on the box, a simply carved wooden affair, as it was thrust toward him. He took it almost involuntarily as it was shoved roughly into his midsection, his hands catching it so as to keep it from plunging through him like a knife in Coeltes’s hand
s. When Coeltes seemed certain he had a firm grip on it, he relinquished his own, still grinning with those even teeth, and his deft fingers slipped to the top and opened it wide before J’anda could do much more than look down with his dull eyes, trying to digest what he was seeing—
“Take this as a sign of my mercy,” the Sovereign said, and waved him away with a single flick of the wrist. “And expect no more tolerance for this sort of behavior. Remember that I am as a parent with you, always guiding you back when I sense you stray.”
J’anda stared down in quiet horror, his mind screaming at him from somewhere within, but it was buried so deep inside under a flat and hollowed out facade that he could scarcely even hear it. “Of course,” he said.
“Go forth and prove yourself reformed,” the Sovereign said, “or next time I shall take Coeltes’s recommendations to heart and punish you severely.” He waved his hand once more. “Go, and look upon my reminder as frequently as you need to in order to cure your tendencies. Seek me again after you have done the penance I have asked.”
J’anda’s body was practically weightless as he nodded, feeling as though his head would fall off his shoulders. It wouldn’t, though, damn it, even as he turned on his heel and walked out, putting one foot in front of another, moving like an empty shell of himself. He stared down into the box as though it contained something he should know, but it didn’t. Just another shell, really, like he was now. Or at least part of one.
Later that night, he would wear the first of his many illusions, draping it over himself and imitating a guard, slipping out of the gates and into the great wide open of the outdoors that he once feared. It held no fear for him now, though, and he kept his illusions firmly upon him until well after he reached the city of Reikonos.
But for now he simply put one foot in front of the other and stared down into Trimane’s empty eyes, his butchered head staring up at J’anda’s out of the box that Coeltes had handed him. And one foot in front of the other carried him off, nearly as bereft of life as what he carried in the box, save for the specter of fear that had settled in his heart like an unwelcome guest, placed there by Vracken Coeltes, to linger like an uninvited guest for every day of the rest of his life.
84.
Terian
He used the axe to guard against the swords that came at him, one after another, but even with his speed he was overmatched, two great knights against his flagging strength and failing will. The front rank of the dead closed around Terian, and he could feel fear starting to overtake him as the guardsmen at his back panicked, surging away, and the army of Goliath closed ranks to kill him.
“Do you feel the change in the air?” his father asked, swinging low with his red blade glowing in the darkness of the cavern. “Do you sense your defeat at hand?”
“I sense a whole lot of death about to sweep through Saekaj and Sovar if I don’t stop them,” Terian said, ripping three corpses apart in a single swing and knocking Sareea off her feet with a hard swipe as he did so. “Once upon a time, you might have cared about that.”
“And once upon a time, you would have done what you were commanded,” Amenon said, striking hard at him. His sword caught upon the axe blade and bounced hard, the harsh clang echoing in the cavern. “You were such a good lad, such an obedient child. Where did you start to fail? Where did your reckless disregard for authority spring from?”
“Probably from that time that you told me to kill my own sister,” Terian said, throwing the blade back at Amenon and knocking him off balance.
“Yet you passed that trial,” Amenon said as Sareea came at Terian from behind. He thrust the bottom of the axe handle at her and hit her squarely in the chest, knocking her backward. Her fall was broken by three soldiers of the dead. “But like a true failure, you never stopped whining about it, dwelling always on what was asked of you instead of what you gained through that test—”
“Always focused on what I lost,” Terian said, feeling the sweat rolling over his upper lip. “On what I chose to take out of this world, on what the soul sacrifice really meant to me. I lost the one truly decent person in my life, the one who joked to escape her horror at what transpired around us.” He attacked his father, striking the red sword with his axe overhand, driving the old man back. “She saw clearly what Saekaj was, the blight it brought, the leeching effect it had on the less fortunate. Everything the Sovereign built he did with an iron hand so strong that it survived his own exile, allowing you and Shrawn to keep rolling on in his absence, ignoring every person you crushed beneath you—including me.”
“You are the same as every failure I ever met in my ascent,” Amenon said, rolling back to his feet with an alacrity Terian found surprising from the dead man. “Always desirous of success until the price became too high. Then the complaints began to issue forth, always talking to justify your failures.”
Terian looked at him with absolute fury. “You are my constant, did you know that? You are everything I have never wanted to be. All I need do is look at you and I know who I desire to be simply by going in the opposite direction of you—”
The strike to his back knocked Terian over, the blade catching him under the back plate and by surprise. His shoulder planted into the tunnel dirt and his head rattled inside the helm. The pain was close to the worst he’d ever felt, writhing inside like someone had set fire to the veins in his back and let the blood within boil.
“And yet you threw away everything you professed to care about to avenge me.” His father dropped into his sight, looking him in the eye as Terian came back to his feet, caught once more between the pincer of Sareea and Amenon. They both wore the looks of satisfaction now, the knowledge of the lions that the sheep was doomed. “As failures do. You never committed to the darkness, always thinking you could run back to the light—and that is why you will die here, unremembered by anyone.”
Terian stood, just barely, the axe of darkness wavering in front of him, and watched helplessly as the two dark knights closed on him, death in their eyes, murder writ large enough for him to read it coming, and helpless enough that he could do nothing to stop it—
85.
J’anda
He threw off the spell of fear like it was nothing, because it was nothing. It was a pale shade of something he had lived with in his heart for the last hundred years, and it was like bitter hemlock poured in his mouth; he spat it out without a drop passing into his gullet. He let the spell pass over him defrayed by his fury, soaked up by the magic he turned in his fingers even now, and a flash of light burst through Coeltes’s own woven spell as J’anda turned it around.
“Do you know why I never used fear in my spells, Coeltes?” J’anda asked, seething fury as his old rival backed up a step. The Staff of the Guildmaster quivered as he hesitantly brought it upright. He’s never seen one of his spells fail like this before. “Because every once in a while, you run across someone who simply has no more time for fear in their own life.”
He brought his hand up with all the darkness he could summon from within, drawing deep on a feeling he had vowed never to inflict upon another soul. “But I somehow find it eminently reasonable to give you more than a fair helping of it by throwing a pox of it into your life.”
For the first time since the days of his training, J’anda Aimant drew upon a lifetime of the bitterest taste he could recall, of the insecurities of hiding, of worrying that someone would see him for what he was and the shame of knowing his cowardice when they did—
And heaped it all into one grand spell that he flung into Vracken Coeltes’s face like a punch.
His enemy’s face crusted over as the spell hit home, weaving into the tightest parts of his mind and entwining itself into his nightmares, dredging them to the surface. J’anda felt the man’s torment, his agony, his insecurity at watching himself—he, Vracken Coeltes, a good lad from a good family, humiliated and beaten in every competition by some rat from Sovar, some less-than-nothing pulled out of the Depths, some pathetic creature
named J’anda Aimant—
And J’anda had not a single ounce of pity left.
He tightened the spell, dragging it around Coeltes’ neck like a noose, circling him with a vision of everyone the guildmaster had ever met laughing at his humiliation, watching him brought low, attacked by those around him, closest to him—people that truly, probably, did not even think about Coeltes—watched them humiliate and shame him in the burning way that J’anda himself had felt on that day in the Sovereign’s throne room. It was a rich spectacle, and in his own mind Coeltes was racked with sobs, burning with tears, reduced to nothing—
When J’anda was sure there was no more insecurity left to seize upon, no more inner torment to work loose with prying fingers, no further humiliation left to inflict, he felt Coeltes start to slip away. It was a curious feeling, and he wondered about the efficacy of his spell in an almost detached way. He was new to it, after all, this particular type of spell weaving, and with Coeltes feeling like he was drifting out of it, at first J’anda thought he was simply breaking loose.
Then he looked upon Coeltes’s face, across the space between them, and knew that it was not so.
Vracken Coeltes’s face was twisted in pain, his hand tight upon the V where his robe met, clawing at his heart as though he could dig it out of his chest, as though it had betrayed him. J’anda moved closer, torn between continuing the spell even as his foe drifted out of it, or stopping the pain before he had finished the task at hand. He watched Coeltes sag against the Staff of the Guildmaster, leaning hard on it before he collapsed to his knees amidst the fallen guardsmen and insurrectionists all around, his bright robes obvious even next to the dyed colors of the citizens of Sovar.
J’anda reached him as Coeltes collapsed to his back, and dropped down to look his old enemy in the eyes as he released the spell’s hold. Coeltes’s eyes swam until they focused on him, like those of a waking man coming out of a deep dream, and his face was creased with pain as he clutched at his chest.
Sanctuary 5.5 - Fated in Darkness Page 37