The Hammer and the Blade (33 page)

  "Come on, whoreson," he said, faking a bravado he didn't feel.

  Holding Baras's gory blade in one hand and Nix's hand axe in the other, the eunuch lumbered toward Nix.

  Since Nix couldn't easily kill the man, he resolved to disable the eunuch's body somehow, ruin his locomotion, and then cut him to pieces.

  The eunuch plodded straight for him. Nix circled laterally as best he could, trying to keep some space between them and wait for an opening.

  Impatient, the eunuch rumbled forward, stabbing at Nix's chest with Baras's sword, but Nix sidestepped the stab and ducked under the eunuch's follow-up slash with the hand axe. He jabbed his punch dagger into the eunuch's knee and the big man stumbled.

  "Got you," Nix said, bounding back out of reach.

  The eunuch, however, surprised Nix when he halflurched, half-hopped forward on his good leg and swung a crosscut at Nix's throat. Nix ducked the swing, but in the process his own wounded leg gave out and he fell sprawling to the sand. Panic fueled him. He whirled around just in time to get his dagger crosswise of the eunuch's down stroke with Baras's sword.

  The parry sent a shooting pain through Nix's wrist, but he steered the larger blade into the sand and rolled away as fast as he could. He heard the eunuch plodding after him, the crunch of sandals on the sand, and climbed to his feet. His leg nearly buckled on him again. Wincing, he held his ground. He held up his daggers as the eunuch closed.

  "These are going into your eyes, slubber. You can't hit what you can't see."

  No answer but the dumb smile and an inexorable advance.

  As Nix prepared to die fighting, Egil appeared behind the eunuch, teeth bared, his hammer raised, blood streaming from his nose and a cut on his scalp, as if Ebenor's eye were crying tears of blood. The eunuch never turned, fixed as he was on Nix. Holding one of his hammers two-handed, Egil slammed the head of the weapon into the eunuch's skull.

  Bone audibly collapsed, brain and shards of skull sprayed Nix in a gory rain. The eunuch stood upright for a moment, the eyes still vacant, the mouth still open in the dumb half-smile, all with Egil's hammer buried halfway in his hollowed-out head.

  For a moment, Nix thought not even the priest's blow would fell whatever the eunuch was, but the huge man sagged to his knees, then fell face first into the sand.

  And when he hit the sand and the light went out of his eyes, an onslaught of thoughts and memories exploded from the opening in his head.

 

 

 
 

Memories pelted Nix, a storm of thoughts and experiences not his own. The mental onslaught knocked him backward to the sand, left him face up to the twilight sky, screaming in pain at the setting sun. His head pounded, the pressure building in his temples to such a degree that he knew his head would soon explode in a shower of gore to rival that of the eunuch's.

  He was distantly aware of Egil's screams echoing his own, the priest writhing in the sand with his hands on either side of his head as if he could hold his skull together with the strength of his arms. Jyme, too, seemed to be screaming.

  Nix rolled over, the pain in his head curling him into a fetal position. He pressed his face into the sand and screamed into the granules. He felt as if acid had been poured inside his skull. He could not bear it;
he could not
. Images, memories, and thoughts slammed into him, rooted into his mind as if they were his own. He could not shelter himself from them. He could only writhe, scream, and endure.

  Phrases thronged his mind, filling his skull, the words portentous: breeders, House Thyss of Hell, the Pact. They stuck in the forefront of his consciousness, the stars around which everything else orbited.

  Of a sudden he knew that House Norristru had pacted with House Thyss of Hell. He knew, too, that to seal the Pact, the Norristru men had sacrificed their seed, cursing themselves to infertility, while the Norristru women had been made to sacrifice their wombs, cursed to annual violation by fiends. They were fertile only to a Thyss-born devil.

  A fiend from Hell – it had been Vik-Thyss for the last hundred and eleven years – arrived once every two years on the night of the Thin Veil, when the walls between worlds were weakest, and violated all Norristru women of child-bearing age. Of the resulting offspring, House Thyss claimed those of fiendish appearance and House Norristru retained those who could pass as human. The alliance with Hell brought the Norristru line ever more arcane knowledge, brought them command of spirits who feared Hell's wrath should they disobey.

  Nix understood that the Pact had become harder and harder to honor with each generation, as more and more of the offspring proved devilish in appearance and were taken by the Thyss. House Norristru had become less like the house of a noble family and more like a mausoleum, empty rooms filled only with memories and the horrors of the past.

  Memories knifed into his brain. Nix was Rusilla, filled with measured hate.

  Against his will, images solidified around the words, mental pictures of diabolic violations of generations of Norristru women. He tried not to see them, tried not to understand the reality of the horror, but the images would not relent. They filled him with disgust. He did not know if they were actual memories or Rusilla's guess at what had occurred, but they were terrible enough make him squirm.

  "Not this," he groaned, his mouth full of sand. "Not this."

  He was himself, remembering the dreams he'd had in the Wastes. They had come from Rusilla. She had been trying to reach him, show him what awaited her and her sister. But he had resisted and never seen. He recalled the swelling, engorged doors, the blood leaking under the jambs, the horrors occurring on the other side of the wood, the bestial sounds of lust a counterpoint to the desperate screams of pain that they hid.

  He could not bear it.

  "Stop!" he shouted. "Stop."

  He was Rakon.

  And the sylph had told him.

  Nix was himself again, and understanding dawned. Rakon had located Abrak-Thyss's prison in the Demon Wastes, at the sea of glass. That is what he had been looking for. And he needed the horn to free him.

  Nix screamed again as more memories filled him. He was Rusilla.

  He was Rakon.

  Nix was himself, and he understood. He understood it all, now.

  He was Rusilla.

  When you find Abrak-Thyss's prison, you will need help entering it and freeing him. You should use the same tomb robbers who killed Vik-Thyss in the tomb of Abn Thahl, Egil of Ebenor and Nix Fall of Dur Follin to assist you. What delicious irony. After Abrak-Thyss is freed you can kill them in revenge for what they did. You'll use the memory eater to kill them. The eater will kill them. The eater will kill them. But only they can do it. Only they can do it. And the eater will kill them, the eater must kill them.

  You cannot leave Rusilla and Merelda alone in the manse. They must accompany you. You'll drug them. But you must take them with you. It's too dangerous to leave them alone. You'll tell your men they are sick, that you're seeking a cure. But you must take them with you.

  A knife stab of pain lanced Nix's head, burning itself into his skull, and it carried a single thought.

  He was Rusilla once more.

  The hopeless, helpless terror caused Nix to weep. He'd had a taste of it in dreams, but then it had been attenuated. Now he felt it firsthand, what the sisters had endured, and he felt deep pity for them, deep shame for himself.

  He'd thought them witches. He'd feared them, thought they'd been trying to hurt him. He wept for his own foolishness.

  Abruptly the pain subsided, but the memories remained, images of horror etched into his brain forever. He lifted his head from the sand and vomit rushed up his throat. He puked into the sand.

  A word moved through Nix's mind, a foul word, an appalling word irreducible beyond the horror and pain it evoked, the word at the center of everything he'd learned from the memories implanted in the eater's mind.

  Rape.

  Rusilla had not been trying to manipulate him. She'd been trying to communicate to him the horror of her existence, the debased, painful fate that awaited her and Merelda if they did not free themselves from their brother.

  Their brother. Their own brother.

  Thinking of Rakon filled him not with his usual sense of smug contempt for fools, but with rage, righteous wrath. His fists balled around the desert sand.

  Rakon had enslaved his own sisters, made them whores to Hell.

  And for what?

  For power.

  Nix had never before wanted a man dead as badly as he wanted Rakon dead. Nix had lived in Rusilla's skin, even if only for a moment, and what he'd felt was beyond words.

  He thought back on his dreams, wincing over the lustful grunting he'd heard behind the doors of the hallway in the Norristru manse. Through the dreams, Rusilla had made him feel an inkling, a mere inkling, of what she and Merelda had felt, the terror and helpless rage that generations of Norristru women had felt while being made to suffer at the hands of Norristru men and the foul devils of Hell.

  He wept anew.

  How could a man do that to his sisters? To any woman?

  The words echoed in his mind, in their way more compelling than Rakon's spellworm had ever been.

  The many lewd glances and lascivious comments that Nix had made to women through the years stared at him accusingly across the gulf of his memory. Tesha. Kiir. He'd always told himself that he was a wit, a flirt, but he could not escape the feeling that his words echoed, however distantly, the kind of thinking that allowed Rakon to justify his sisters' sexual enslavement. He suddenly felt like he weighed four hundred stone. Shame weighed him down.