Restoration (47 page)

Apprehensive, I flew on toward the castle I'd had built to house both friends and enemies—friends so I could protect them, enemies so I could watch them. One of my enemies had been left behind when we abandoned Kir‘Vagonoth—Gennod, who had tried to force the joining with the human ... me ... and lead the opening of Kir'Navarrin himself. He had intended to destroy the Ezzarians and free the prisoner in Tyrrad Nor. But I had outma neuvered him and left him imprisoned in the pits with the mad Gastai.

When I saw and felt and heard a whirlwind of darkness on the horizon where I should have seen ice towers piercing the clouds, I thought of the broken door seal on the pits. No Gastai could have wreaked such havoc on all we had built here. Only a Nevai—one of our most powerful circle—could have done so. Gennod was free.

A little further and I glimpsed the castle towers above the whirlwind—one, two, three, at least, still intact. From inside the dark wall of the storm I heard the howling din of full-scale demon battle. “I knew this was too easy,” I said to Drych. “Hold on.” I gathered speed and streaked through the storm, penetrating the black wall. In the murk were beasts of every kind, changing shape even as I passed, clawing each other, flying, wrestling on the ground, their fur or scales or wings whipped by the circling wind. I dodged a dragon's blast of fire, barely missed having my legs sheared off by razor-edged wings, and then flew high to avoid a pair of bearlike creatures that tore at each other with steel claws. Three slavering wolves charged again and again at a breached wall where a single rai-kirah wearing a human form was trying to keep them back. The defender would not last long without help.

Up and over I flew. Poor Drych whimpered softly as I shot almost straight down into the clear eye of the whirlwind. Half of my castle lay in ruins. What remained was still marvelously beautiful, its icy facets transforming the fires of destruction into jewel-like iridescence. On its highest battlement stood a figure of silver light, her radiance extending a shield of power to protect the citadel. Her golden hair flew free in the wind, and her white gown might have been a creation of swirling snow. As I circled and set my feet on the ice, her green eyes widened in wonder and touched me with true fire.

“My love,” she said. “Oh, my dearest love, how is this possible?” Surprise and disbelief must have shaken her composure. She would never have permitted such warmth to show had she been given warning of my coming. Her greeting bore no remnant of the fury of our last meeting—when she had cursed me yet again for abandoning her in favor of duty. We had known my choice would mean losing myself in a human soul, and she had sworn never to forgive me. So many years we had loved—

I wrenched myself away from these disturbing thoughts and emotions, the demon's most private memories ... and instantly felt shamed. Somehow in this dreadful place where Denas had lived and fought and raged against cruel fate, the true horror of what I had done to him for the last year of his existence struck home. I had walled him up in a prison of silence. To crush these last whispers would be murder, as surely as if I had taken my Warden's knife and plunged it into his heart.

And so I put aside my own guilt and discomfort and set free the buried memories of Vallyne and unfulfilled love, allowing them to flood over me. I touched her face and saw her probing hunger.
Oh, gods, a thousand years...
But though her gaze searched deep for the passion to match hers, hollow memory was all that remained. All I had to offer was admiration, respect, and the traces of the enchantment she had laid on her captive Warden. I had killed the part of me that might respond. She needed to know the truth.

“I am not the one you think,” I said, unlocking our gaze and crouching down to ease Drych to the ground. “No matter this aura I happen to have acquired. Or rather I am he, as we knew would happen, but I am myself as well. Mostly myself.” The only thing more difficult than defining my state of mind in my own head, was trying to explain it to anyone else—even to Vallyne with whom I had discussed the implications of human joining for a hundred years.

Vallyne folded her arms across her breast and bit her lip, smiling in resigned amusement. Then she walked around me slowly, examining every aspect of my flesh in minute detail. I wondered if the ridiculous rush of blood to my cheeks would be as obvious beneath the gold light I wore. Unlike the immodest Derzhi, Ezzarians usually kept themselves clothed. “You wear the color well,” she said at last, “though your body is not quite so beautiful as the one you ... Denas ... wore in your time here.” Only then did she look me in the eye again, genuine pleasure almost hiding the depths of her sadness. “I am happy to see you, friend Seyonne.”

“And I you, Lady,” I said. “I've come seeking sanctuary for my young friend here, and your aid in retrieving two of our brothers who still languish in the pits. Will you grant us your favor?”

“You've no need to ask for whatever I have,” she said, shrugging off painful truth and shifting her attention to the dazed Drych. “Welcome, friend of my friend.” She crouched down beside the young man and extended her hand. He was staring awestruck at a rai-kirah wholly at odds with his training and experience—a being of light, color, and beauty that seared the heart, as unlike the monsters who had fashioned his torment as the soft breezes of Ezzaria were from the storm around us. Remembering my own first glimpse of Vallyne, I guessed he was no longer noticing the cold. “I've already summoned someone who'll get you warmed and fed,” Vallyne went on. “I regret that our hospitality has so sadly lapsed. No dancing at all. Quite limited sustenance, and we daren't ride out for pleasure. No charming, ever-confused guest such as this one”—she nodded her head at me and widened her eyes in teasing—“to read for us. And this—” She waved her hand at the wild darkness that spun around the castle. “Sadly, I might be feeding you in this hour, only to leave you starving and frozen again when the time vessel next empties itself.”

“Gennod let them loose. How was he capable of it?”

Vallyne flushed. “I'm afraid those you left here to guard were not such good jailers. We thought someone would come back for us, but no one did. And with no word of when we might expect it ... Have you so soon forgotten the craving, my love?” Her voice was scarcely audible above the storm. “We hungered so. Don't blame us.”

“Someone thought to let a few Gastai go hunting.” To feed on a human soul and bring back the experiences and sensations to share with those remaining in this wasteland. “And the hunters returned worse than ever.”

“Indeed so. Though we don't understand why.”

“Dreams,” I said, thinking aloud, putting the evidence together at last, understanding how Nyel had been able to touch the rai-kirah all these thousand years. “Rai-kirah living in Kir‘Vagonoth cannot dream. But when the Gastai possess a human soul, they dream, and those dreams can be changed ... touched ... by the one in the tower, just as my dreams were touched. All these years we Ezzarians have believed that we made the demons worse by our combat, but it was never our doing. It was his.”

“His? So you've gone there ...”

“It's complicated,” I said, and then took refuge in the problem of the moment. “Gennod's wearing you down.”

“We'll hold. Though I would not refuse a few more warriors were they available.
You
look quite capable.”

“I've come here by a means I don't quite understand,” I said. “That's why I'm not sure I can get my three young friends out of Kir‘Vagonoth as yet, and I'm not sure how long I can stay—” An earsplitting screech and a burst of flame drew us to the edge of the battlement. The graceful turret of the outermost tower splintered under the assault of a monstrous bird, sending great shards of ice whirling into the storm. The fragments glinted silver and gold and blue in the firelight, dusting towers and windows and the three of us with new frost.

The bird's head and long neck were that of a serpent roughly the diameter of a large tree, its body the size of a house, and its small eyes glowed red; only a demon of considerable power could shape such a monster. “Gennod,” Vallyne and I said together.

Two slightly smaller birds with sharp talons and hooked beaks flew out of the broken tower. They were certainly more agile than the serpent bird and ferocious in their defense, but they stood no chance, as the wingspread of the giant bird was so much larger. Even as we watched, one of the smaller birds raked the monster's back with its claws. The serpent's tongue whipped out and caught the harrying defender, who disintegrated in a burst of purple fire. The second defender shot high into the churning sky, then plummeted toward the serpent bird, talons fully extended. The monster's wings swept the air with such force as to flip the smaller bird upside down, the heavy wings slamming into the helpless defender and crumpling its lighter frame. Colored light oozed from the broken bird like living blood, beginning to take a humanlike form, but before it could reshape itself, the dazed rai-kirah was swept away by the dark whirlwind.

With a scream of triumph and a flick of its ropelike tongue, the serpent bird returned to its assault on the tower, shattering first one and then another portion until all that remained of the graceful structure was a glassy mountain of blue-gray ice far below us. Then the bird rose into the air, circled lazily about the castle, and laid its red serpent's eye on Vallyne.

Freed from the momentary paralysis induced by the duel, I ran across the frosted battlement. “Someone will come for you, lad,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Heal well and save your brothers.”
And you, glorious Vallyne, liveforever!
Without breaking stride, I leaped up to the merlon and into the churning air, yanking the sword from the sheath at my side and spreading my golden wings. Drawing melydda from my blood and bone, I summoned the wind to my service and soared upward toward the monster.

A sharp edge bit into my hand, threatening to slice through to bone, and I loosened my grip on the hard, angular lump. What inept sword maker would leave such a ridge on a sword grip? Even as the stench of burning feathers and seared flesh yielded to scents of roses and tea and wet grass, and the harsh screams of dying monsters gave way to the hiss of quiet rain, the laceration on my palm stung more fiercely—a tether drawing me out of battle and storm. I opened my hand and stared. The black warrior ... the obsidian game piece.

“I had more to do,” I said. “The gateway to the pits ... the two other Wardens ...” I set the piece carefully on the game board, forcing my hand not to tremble—my quite ordinary hand with its familiar scars. My bones ached. My shoulders felt raw; the seepage from my throbbing left thigh was surely blood. My right side felt as if a spike had been driven inward and upward into my lung. At least I was clothed again; nonetheless, I felt vulnerable—flaccid, weak, as if half my blood had been drained away.

“Your dreamer must have fallen asleep,” said Nyel from across the game board. “You cannot remain with him once he sleeps again and begins a new dream.”

I could not take my eyes from the patterned game board, for in the trickery of light and dark, of pattern and form, I could still catch glimpses of a silver brilliance that pierced whipping clouds to give me heart, of long, difficult hours of combat in my golden form, slaying the serpent bird just when I had begun to fear that I could not. “His waking shadow,” I said. “Made flesh from his dream.”

“The
vietto
is the rarest of enchantments, even among the Madonai. Passed from master to
attellé
if the student's power is great enough. If the student's heart is generous enough. If the student's soul is rich enough to weave it with wisdom.”

“I need to get back to my sword practice.” Kasparian shoved his chair away from the table. “You've no need of me anymore.” His heavy footsteps echoed through the silent house. The voiceless servants came in and stoked the fire and closed the garden doors against the splatter of rain and the rapidly cooling night. Night. I had been in Kir‘Vagonoth an entire day.

“The
vietto.
This is how you traveled to the human world,” I said, looking up at my companion as the last vision faded. “You and your friend Hyrdon, who didn't want to be a god.”

Nyel was leaning back in his chair, sipping a glass of wine. “It took me quite a while to realize that I had taken flesh in a true world and was no longer part of a dream, that my deeds in that realm were true events, not just a passing vision. Who could imagine such a thing? I told myself it was dangerous to meddle, foolish to become involved with beings so ephemeral. But I could not stay away from the forest people. They lived in beauty, just as we did here, and I could not understand how they bore such hardships—hunger, disease, and early death—yet remained so in love with living. I tried to care for them, teach them whatever I could that might ease their way. As time passed, I decided to choose only one of them at a time to be my dreamer. Things get very confusing when you touch too many different minds. And indeed you remain somewhat ... attached ... to the person who brings you through. On your recent adventure, for example, you would have found it difficult to stray too far from the young man. You felt the bond with him, well beyond your shared experience of torment.”

True. All true. “Why did I take on this altered form ... the light ... the sword? Is that part of it? I couldn't shape myself the way I wanted.”

Nyel rose and walked to the table in the middle of the room where carafes of wine and ale stood ready for his choosing. He refilled his glass, filled a second one, and brought it to me. A few stray red droplets fell toward the game board, vanishing the moment they touched it. “This enchantment is of the Madonai, not the rekkonarre. With the
vietto,
the enchanter becomes the physical expression of his power. His every other form is but a shadow of this one. And so this was your true Madonai form—a warrior's form, it seems—that tried to show itself. It would always be the shape of your greatest strength, though you surely could have changed to whatever you wished had you understood how to do so. But you are bound to human flesh, and so your transformation was flawed, incomplete.” He settled in his chair again and ran a finger along the smooth edge of the game board. “The pain and weariness you feel now are the cost of your human birth, as is the truth that you cannot do this thing of yourself. You needed me to guide the enchantment for you ... and you needed Kasparian, of course, because the one who stole my name also stole my ability to initiate such workings or, indeed, to accomplish any save this one.”