The Descent (33 page)

TWENTY

A
dair opens his eyes and finds he’s on his feet in a dark, misty space. At least the journey is over. It had been awful, a rocky plummet, and he had been choked with dread and, strangely, a sense of failure every inch of the way. He’d had the feeling of déjà vu the entire time, too. Impossibly, he was reminded of an experience he’d never had, clinging to a cliff somewhere, surrounded by blackness with flashes like lightning. But the descent is over now and he wants to put the journey behind him. He aches as though he has been on the losing end of a fight or locked in a trunk and thrown down a mountain.

Where has he ended up? he wonders. He seems to have touched down at a castle. He doesn’t recognize it but, again, feels as though he’s been here before. The sensation of déjà vu is insistent, clamoring in his head like a fire alarm, and he
reacts in a basic, instinctual way. Fight or flight, his senses tell him. The urge to flee is almost irresistible.

Adair moves down the hallway slowly and carefully, listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. In a place this big, there are bound to be people: the occupants, but also guards, servants. He is diligent and checks around doorways, peeks down staircases, at a loss as to how to even begin looking for Lanore in this place. He no longer feels her presence, the thread by which they have been connected and the means by which he’d figured he’d locate her.

And he feels awful. After centuries of being perfectly healthy, of not having a day of illness—no cold or headache, or a broken bone that lasted longer than an instant—the sensation is unbearable. He is racked with pain from head to toe, as though his body is trying to turn itself inside out. He has the most powerful urge to curl over, hands on knees, and vomit. To purge himself. Something inside him is trying to get out—he is carrying something that must be expelled. Ignoring the pain, Adair presses down another hall, one that seems to take him closer to the center of the building. He doesn’t know where he is, or who lives here—though he thinks he knows . . . he feels the awful truth in the pit of his stomach.

Before long, Adair realizes he is getting closer to an occupied part of the castle. He hears murmuring, distant rumblings at the end of the hall. It’s an indistinct conversation being held between two people; he can hear the tone of their voices, but all the details have been washed out. Meanwhile, the pain in his head hasn’t gotten any better; if anything, it’s gotten worse, so sharp now that he can barely keep his
thoughts together. His vision is broken up with white flashes before his eyes. His head feels as though it’s going to explode, as though it would pulverize if you touched it—and there’s that sense of déjà vu again, because he’s felt this precise pain before. Yes, the sensation is so familiar at that moment, it’s as though he felt it only yesterday—

Suddenly, Adair finds he has stumbled into the middle of a huge chamber. The ceiling stretches skyward, soaring so high that it disappears in what appear to be clouds, so that you can’t tell if there’s a ceiling at all. The room might actually be open to heaven. Giant columns anchor the room and they, too, reach for heaven. Through his blurred and racked vision, Adair sees there is—
my God
—the demon from his dream standing before him. The topaz eyes have definitely found him, but the beast has no reaction. In a moment of clarity, Adair notices a second demon, and a third, no—there are a lot of them, and they ring the perimeter, standing guard. Great ugly beasts they are, more frightening in life than in the flat, safe space of dreams. Each demon weighs at least a half ton if he weighs an ounce. Their glittering eyes are trained on him, each and every one. Adair’s stomach drops to his knees. He expects they will seize him and take him to their queen, if he is lucky, or tear him limb from limb if he is not. He is frozen, waiting to see what they do next.

To his utter amazement, the demons do not rush toward him, snarling, with bared teeth. No, to his disbelief, they bend to one knee, each and every one of them, one demon after the other, each bending and bowing their heads to him. Adair turns in a slow circle, surveying the demons kneeling before him, and as he does so, a thunderbolt rings through
his skull. Through the intense pain, he comes to a realization. He has been here before, he has lived here before. He remembers. He knows this place. His past rushes back to him, haltingly, in pieces, scenes, memories, responsibilities, duties. His time on earth, the life he has known, starts to shrink in his mind. It seems so short in comparison to what he has given to this place, to the underworld. To his home. That’s what has been trying to get out of his head: false memories, the man he thought he was, the story that had been planted in his head. Stories he’s believed implicitly for a thousand years, and they’re all lies. It’s incompatible with the truth that rushes up to him now like a happy child being reunited with its parent, embracing him, unwilling to let go of him. Recollections of his past, his
true
past, rush to fill his head.

Suddenly, the queen is standing before him. How happy she is, her sternly beautiful face lit up with joy. She walks toward him, her arms outstretched, reaching for him. She is magnificent in her way, the quintessence of a particular kind of female beauty, coldly triumphant.

Adair is dumbfounded. Unbelievably, she comes up to him, taking his hands in hers and—when he doesn’t resist her—slips into an embrace with him. This embrace feels as familiar to him as breathing. Held in her arms, he knows that they have done this thousands upon thousands of times. Yet, his skin crawls when it comes in contact with hers, as though they are incompatible, as though they are two chemicals that form a corrosive acid when they mix. He wants to escape from her, but he can’t. She holds him tight like the very embrace of death.

“You’ve come back to me,” she whispers in his ear. Her voice is thick and sweet, like honey. “I knew you would come
back to me, and to your kingdom. Nothing has changed; I have held it all in wait for your return. We have all waited for your return, all your faithful servants. Now that you are back, you will resume the throne as king, and as my husband, and together we will rule the underworld, as we were meant to by our father, the lord of lords.” The queen is nearly crying with joy, and, trembling, she brings her lips close to his. She pauses before she kisses him. “Welcome home, my lord.”

TWENTY-ONE

T
he room is still spinning. Adair feels as though he is in the middle of a Catherine wheel, one of the many torture devices in the Middle Ages (and one he experienced personally, he recalls with discomfort). The room revolves around him on a wild ellipse. He intuits that the bed beneath him is big, as big as a meadow, and he is sprawled across it carelessly. The queen sits beside him, running her fingers through his sweaty, matted hair, patting a cold cloth to his forehead. She cannot stop touching him, though he wishes she would—her touch makes his skin crawl.

“You cannot imagine how hard I wished for this day,” she croons to him. “You are home at last. You have come home to me,” she says over and over, as though convincing herself.

“Stop saying that. Stop,” he says, pleading grimly. The past has caught up with him, overtaken him, and now floods him
mercilessly with memories. Each memory is hard and sharp, like the whack of a bat to the back of his head. Adair remembers why he left: to escape eternal wedlock to this woman; anyone but her. He could not stomach the two of them ruling the underworld as husband and wife. When there are so few deities, there was no option but for him to be forced to wed her. And yet she is a despicable choice he cannot abide.

Have they been to bed already? His memory will not take him there. Is that why she behaves the way she does with him, why she is so stung, so hateful and resentful?

He sits up abruptly, his stomach lurching, and jerks her hand from his head, pushes it aside in disgust. She pulls back, regarding him cautiously for a moment, and then digs into a pocket and presses something small in his hand—a vial encrusted with filigree loops. Dirt clings in the cracks. “I have something for you. Do you remember this?”

He holds it up, squints at it to be sure—just as he’d feared, it is the very one he’d given to Lanore as their means of finding their way back to each other. As recognition crosses his features, she continues, “Our lord of lords, the power above us all, gave it to you when we were children. He gave one to me, too. He said it held the tears of his wife,” she says, nodding at the vial.

Adair remembers the woman as perpetually sad—hence, the tears. Her tears had turned into a sticky resin and he had fed that resin, by drops, onto the tongues of mortals he wished to keep with him as fellow immortals. Adair brushes the dirt off the vial as best he can and tucks it in a pocket.

He turns to the queen. “Look, I’ve no desire to stretch this out any longer than is absolutely necessary. You know why I’ve
come back. I’m here for Lanore. She is all that I want. Return her to me and I’ll go. You can have the underworld all to yourself.”

If his words have hurt her, she hides it well. She sits up straight and proud, her neck arched like a swan’s, but her head is bowed gracefully like an obedient wife. “I don’t want to rule the underworld alone,” she tells him with perfect sincerity. “And I am your bride—not her.”

“I’ll not stay,” he warns her.

“You can’t go,” she says. A simple statement of fact. “There is no way out.”

“I escaped once,” he reminds her.

“You won’t cross the abyss twice, you know that. You were lucky—infinitely lucky—to cross it the first time,” she says. A worried look flits across her face. “And you shouldn’t press your luck a second time. If you fail, the lord of lords might not forgive you. We are not irreplaceable. You know that, too.”

“I would be glad to be replaced.” He knows it will make her unhappy to hear him say this, but he must be true to himself. “I’m not repudiating you. Don’t take this as a rejection. It’s just that—I cannot be wed to you.”

Her face hardens and she turns away from him in preservation of her dignity. “How can I
not
take it as a rejection? How can it
not
be personal? You don’t want me as your wife, even though we were meant to be together. This is out of our hands. It is the natural order of things. You can’t fight it any more than I can.”

He can’t help himself; under pressure, the words blurt out like juice from a lemon. “You are not my wife. You must accept that I will never be your husband.”

His declaration seems to tear something inside the queen. She leaps up from the bed and whirls on him. Her magnificence blooms when she is angry—the same as his does. They are mirrors of each other. “Do not think you can be rid of me so easily, my lord. Do not think you can be unkind to me and dismiss me. You cannot threaten me. Do you think you are my match? You’re not even close—you haven’t used your powers in a thousand years, whereas I have been a god for every day of those years. You are weak and in no position to oppose me.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can snuff the life out of me, if that’s what you want. I would rather die than be with you.” The words leap from his mouth. He doesn’t think before he speaks; if he was impatient on earth, he is more so here, his old fury coming back on him swiftly. The queen winces; they are mean, these words, but true, and so he cannot take them back.

“It doesn’t matter how you or I feel—you won’t be allowed to do as you please. Order must be maintained in the heavens. Do you think the gods will let you get away with this?” she asks pointedly. She is not going to remain to be insulted and affronted, and, having said her piece, she disappears in a puff of vivid blue smoke, as though she has exploded from anger.